The Lockerbie bomber wrote an impassioned plea for help while locked up in one of Britain’s toughest jails - and blamed his alleged accomplice for the atrocity.
Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi’s adviser Daad Sharab, 61, visited Abdelbaset al-Megrahi three times in Scotland. She took a letter from Megrahi which he wrote to the King of Jordan in Barlinnie jail in a desperate bid to be freed.
Megrahi told how Nelson Mandela had visited him and supported his campaign for release. He claimed Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, the man cleared of the bombing when he faced trial alongside Megrahi in 2001, “put the suitcase on the flight”.
Megrahi wrote: “I have to write because of the great suffering condemned to imprisonment for false accusation. I am an Arabic Libyan unfairly convicted in the case of what is called Lockerbie. It was a false accusation based on the allegation I was the suspect who bought the clothes from a storekeeper in Malta.
“They were found in the remains of the suitcase bomb that was the cause for the plane crash over Lockerbie... my colleague, the second suspect who was acquitted by the court, is the one who put the suitcase on the flight from Malta.”
He added: “My presence at Malta, if it were really the beginning of this crime, as claimed by the allegation, was merely to get some necessities. The great man Nelson Mandela came to visit me in prison. He is still doing what he can, and he does so even with the families of the victims.”
In December, the US Department of Justice named Fhimah as an accomplice following the arrest of a former Libyan intelligence officer who stands accused of making the Lockerbie bomb. Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud, 71, awaits trial in the US after he was allegedly directed by a Libyan intelligence official to fly to Malta with a prepared suitcase. He was met by Megrahi and Fhimah at the airport, say prosecutors.
“Several days later, Megrahi and Fhimah instructed Mas’ud to set the timer on the device in the suitcase for the following morning, so that the explosion would occur exactly 11 hours later,” the details of the charge add. Megrahi and Fhimah were both at the airport on the morning of December 21, 1988, and Mas’ud handed the suitcase to Fhimah after Fhimah gave him a signal to do so. Fhimah then placed the suitcase on the conveyor belt. Subsequently, Mas’ud boarded a Libyan flight to Tripoli schedule to take off at 9am.”
Days after returning to Libya, Mas’ud and Megrahi allegedly met an intelligence official who thanked them for a “successful operation”. Fhimah got a hero’s welcome after he was cleared in 2001, and pledged to campaign for the release of Megrahi. Fhimah said it was an “accident” the bomb went off while the plane was flying over Lockerbie, killing 11 people on the ground as well as the 259 passengers.
In 2012, the Scottish Crown Office requested a private legal hearing in Malta regarding possible prosecutions in the Lockerbie case.
It said: “It is alleged that the said Megrahi and Fhimah, acting in concert with others and with the Libyan intelligence services, caused an improvised explosive device to be placed among clothing and an umbrella, which had been purchased in Malta, within a suitcase which had been tagged so as to enable it to be carried on Air Malta flight KM180 to Frankfurt on 21 December, 1988.”
At the time a Scottish Crown Office spokesman said: “The trial court accepted that Megrahi acted in furtherance of the Libyan intelligence services in an act of state-sponsored terrorism and did not act alone.”
Megrahi died, aged 60, in 2012 after his early release three years earlier following a cancer diagnosis.
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