Thaindian News

Washington, May 20 (IANS) Abdelbeset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the lone person convicted in the bombing of a US plane over Scotland’s Lockerbie that killed 270 people, died Sunday, CNN reported quoting Libyan government officials.

Al Megrahi - a former intelligence officer who had suffered from prostate cancer - was 60.

He will be buried Monday, a foreign ministry spokesman told CNN.

Al Megrahi’s cousin Omer al-Gharyani told CNN he was with al Megrahi at the Tripoli hospital when he died.

His death came more than two years after he was freed from a life sentence in Scotland on the grounds that he was dying.

The destruction of the Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 was one of the deadliest acts of terrorism against Americans.

American and British investigators who pieced together the wreckage of the Pan Am 103 found it had been destroyed by a bomb, and they accused al Megrahi and another man of planting it.

Al Megrahi - once the security chief for Libyan Arab Airlines - and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah were Libyan intelligence agents, according to the US and Britain, which indicted the two in November 1991 on 270 counts of murder and conspiracy to murder.

He was released from a Scottish prison on the grounds that he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in August 2009 and was expected to have only a few months to live.

He was sent home to Libya on “compassionate” grounds, and received a hero’s welcome at the airport.

His release - a little more than eight years after being sentenced to life in prison - and the celebrations that greeted him in Libya sparked condemnation from the US and British governments and the families of the victims.