By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and ROD NORDLAND
Published: August 29, 2011
TRIPOLI, Libya — An official with the rebel government has ruled out extraditing Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, who was released from a Scottish prison two years ago on the ground that he was near death.
Rebel officials, meanwhile, appealed on Monday for NATO forces to continue the air campaign that has greatly weakened Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, saying the fugitive Libyan leader, whose whereabouts remained a mystery on Monday, was still a threat.
“I call for continued protection from NATO and its allies from this tyrant,” Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, the head of the Transitional National Council, as the rebel administration is known, said at a meeting of alliance defense chiefs in Doha, Qatar, on Monday, news reports said.
“He is still a threat, not just for Libya but for the entire world.”
He spoke as rebel forces, who stormed the capital over a week ago, were reported to be approaching Colonel Qaddafi’s hometown of Surt, regarded as a last bastion of support more than 200 miles east of Tripoli on the Mediterranean coast. News reports said the rebels were seeking a negotiated surrender of the town.
Western unease about the Megrahi case dates to August, 2009, when Scottish authorities agreed to his early release from prison on the grounds that he suffered from terminal prostate cancer and had only months to live.
A hero’s welcome in Libya for him and his failure to die infuriated the United States and other Western governments. Calls for his return had been mounting as the Libyan revolution unfolded. But it was uncertain whether the rebels had received a formal extradition request.
Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, told Sky News on Monday: “We have never had and do not have any intention of asking for the extradition of Mr. Megrahi.”
He added: “It’s quite clear from the Libyan Transitional Council that following their own laws there was never any intention of agreeing to such extradition.”
The rebels’ resolve to protect the former officer may prove only briefly relevant, however. CNN reported that Mr. Megrahi was near death at his villa in the capital here, broadcasting images of a frail man lying comatose in an oxygen mask.
Mr. Megrahi’s death would end the possibility of eliciting his full account of the Libyan government’s role in the bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, 189 of them Americans. But it would also remove a potentially serious point of friction between the rebels’ Transitional National Council and its Western backers.
Politicians and lawmakers in the United States had begun calling for his return to finish answering for the bombing. But the justice minister of the transitional council equated an extradition of Mr. Megrahi with a betrayal characteristic of the hated and fugitive dictator, Muammar el-Qaddafi.
“Al-Megrahi has already been judged once and he will not be judged again,” the minister, Mohammed al-Alagi, told reporters in Tripoli on Sunday, according to Reuters. “We do not hand over Libyan citizens,” he added. “Qaddafi does.”
Less than eight hours later, Nic Robertson of CNN reported having found Mr. Megrahi at the villa, where his family said that it was caring for him without help and that he was dying.
“We just give him oxygen,” the report quoted Mr. Megrahi’s son, Khaled, as saying. “Nobody gives us any advice. There is no doctor. There is nobody to ask. We don’t have any phone line to call anybody.”
The rebels added to their military gains on Sunday, saying that they had captured Bin Jawwad, a strategic eastern hamlet that has in the past been a stumbling block on their path toward Surt.
They also announced that two oil fields would restart production within a few weeks, with exports of crude likely to resume from the oil terminal in the eastern port of Tobruk by the end of September, Reuters reported. But refineries remained closed, the rebels said, so fuel will still have to be imported.
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