LONDON — The only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland — a terrorist attack that killed 270 people, most of them Americans — was flown home to Libya from Britain to a hero's welcome Thursday after serving eight years of his life sentence.
The Scottish government granted early release to Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, 57, on "compassionate grounds," saying he suffers from prostate cancer and has only a few months to live.
The move was made over vehement objections from the U.S. and some of the families of those killed, although the relatives of other victims welcomed it as the right decision for a wrongly condemned man.
"Our beliefs dictate that justice be served but mercy be shown," Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said. He added that al-Megrahi "now faces a sentence imposed by a higher power. ... It is terminal, final and irrevocable. He is going to die."
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That was scant satisfaction for the White House, which swiftly deplored the release.
"As we have expressed repeatedly to officials of the government of the United Kingdom and to Scottish authorities, we continue to believe that al-Megrahi should serve out his sentence in Scotland," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement.
It was a rare diplomatic dust-up between the U.S. and its closest ally. But it is unlikely to cause any real damage to the Anglo-American "special relationship," in part because the decision emanated from the devolved government in Scotland, run by the Scottish Nationalist Party, rather than the central government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Al-Megrahi issued a statement that said in part: "This horrible ordeal is not ended by my return to Libya. It may never end for me until I die. Perhaps the only liberation for me will be death. And I say in the clearest possible terms, which I hope every person in every land will hear: All of this I have had to endure for something that I did not do."
Authorities linked al-Megrahi, a suspected Libyan spy, to the Lockerbie attack through pieces of clothing wrapped around the bomb. Investigators traced the purchase of the clothes to al-Megrahi.
But an independent judicial commission in Scotland concluded two years ago that one of the prosecution witnesses was unreliable and that the link between al-Megrahi and the clothes from Malta was dubious.
