The Scottish government has decided that the man convicted of masterminding the Lockerbie bombing will go free.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi had asked to be released on compassionate grounds since he's dying of prostate cancer.

He wanted to visit with family in Libya or be transferred to a Libyan prison.

Megrahi was sentenced in 2001 to 27 years in a Scottish prison after a three-judge panel convicted him of masterminding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

The U.S.-bound jet had left London's Heathrow Airport a little late on December 21st, 1988.

The delay would turn out to be significant, as the jet blew up over land instead of over the ocean where all traces would've disappeared.

As it was, air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane over the tiny burg of Lockerbie, Scotland.

Investigators would later piece together the plane's fuselage and theorize a bomb hidden in a Sony boom box inside a Samsonite suitcase exploded in the luggage hold.

The plane's demise was swift, but it's likely the 16-member flight crew and many of the 243 passengers were alive and conscious as they hurtled toward the ground.

Among the passengers were 180 Americans, including a score of college students returning from studies abroad and at least four U.S. intelligence officers.

A fireball destroyed several houses, killing eleven people on the ground and scorching the area so badly that many locals thought the local nuclear power plant had had a meltdown.

Investigators asked residents to touch nothing, and bodies lay decomposing on people's steps and lawns for days as the unprecented probe made slow, meticulous progress.

The FBI, working with Scottish police, would trace a piece of the circuit board that was used in the bomb's timer.

It was similar to a bomb found on a Libyan intelligence agent earlier that year.

It took until 1999 to convince the North African country to turn over two officials believed connected to the bombing.

One man, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted in the same 2001 trial in the Netherlands that saw Megrahi convicted.

Libya would also pay two-point-seven billion to compensate victims in 2002.

Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, has sought to appeal his conviction, which rested on the piece of circuit board that was never tested for traces of explosives.

The timer's Swiss maker has said the FBI tried to bribe him that he'd supplied Libya with the device, and an employee of the firm admitted in 2007 that he'd lied at Megrahi's trial.

Megrahi dropped his appeals last week as a prelude to being let go. The controversy over Megrahi's trial has led many British people to root for his release, contrasting with the view of the American families of victims who would prefer to see him die behind bars.

　

　

(Copyright 2009 by Newsroom Solutions)