By spilling oil all over the world, BP has made billions. And now a U.S. senator is wondering if BP stands to make billions more from a BP-Libya oil deal after helping set free a terrorist convicted of killing Americans. Libyan Abdel Bastet Al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, aroused those suspicions last August when he was released from a Scottish prison after doctors gave him 3 months to live. A year later Al-Megrahi is living within the lap of luxury as BP prepares to drill off Libya’s coast.
Senators want Lockerbie bomber back in jail
The Lockerbie bomber, convicted for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, would still be in jail if the senators had their way. New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg sees evidence suggesting the Lockerbie bomber release is tied to the BP-Libya oil deal as an possibility to increase political pressure on the culprit of the2 010 oil spill within the Gulf of Mexico.
Is timing of Lockerbie bomber release and BP-Libya oil deal a coincidence?
The Lockerbie bomber release from prison “on compassionate grounds” after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer is now in question. Al-Megrahi, now 58, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 that killed 270 people, including 189 Americans. Yahoo News reports that Lautenberg wants the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to investigate whether serial oil spiller BP influenced Al-Megrahi ’s release after he served only eight years of a life sentence. He wants to know if the Lockerbie bomber’s release was connected to a BP plan to start drilling within the next few months off Libya, which the senator says could earn the company up to $ 20 billion.
Lockerbie bomber alive and well
The British government felt pressure from U.S. senators to investigate the Lockerbie bomber release after a doctor said Al-Megrahi has ten years ahead of him. The Associated Press reports that Democrats Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer of New York and Lautenberg and fellow New Jersey senator Robert Menendez requested the investigation in a July 7 letter to the U.K.’s ambassador to the U.S. . British Ambassador Sir Nigel Sheinwald told the senators that due process was followed.
BP: what’s a little terrorism when it comes to oil?
In a letter about his BP-Libya oil deal/ Lockerbie bomber suspicions to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Lautenberg said a 2007 oil agreement may have influenced the British and Scottish governments about the Lockerbie bomber’s release in 2009. BP admitted that the oil deal was in jeopardy over a prisoner transfer agreement with Libya, the letter said. Citing “overwhelming interests for the United Kingdom, Jack Straw, the British Secretary of State for Justice, later changed his mind about excluding Al-Megrahi from the prisoner transfer.
BP-Libya oil deal trumps justice
So far, BP has kept mum about the senators’ questions about the release of the Lockerbie bomber. However, CNN reports that on the BP site the oil spill business talked up the 2007 Libyan oil agreement as “the single biggest exploration financial commitment an international energy business has ever made to Libya”. The British ambassador defends the Lockerbie bomber’s release in a letter to Gillibrand posted on the British Embassy website. Brian Flynn, whose brother was killed on Pan Am flight 103, fought to deny Al-Megrahi his freedom. He told CNN:
“You can’t allow the process of justice to be corrupted by the cynical mercantilism of one business.”
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