Doctor: Lockerbie bomber may live for years
Associated Press
EDINBURGH, Scotland (AP) - A Libyan man convicted of murdering 270 people by blowing up a passenger jet could live for several more years, a leading cancer specialist said Friday - two years after the terminally ill bomber was freed on compassionate grounds because he was close to death.
Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was released from a Scottish jail and flown back to Libya on Aug. 20, 2009 after prison doctors estimated he had only three months to live.
His survival has made him a propaganda asset for embattled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi - and an embarrassment for British authorities, who are facing calls to return al-Megrahi to prison if Gadhafi’s regime falls.
Al-Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of killing 270 people, most of them American, when New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on Dec. 21, 1988.
Scottish authorities have come under attack from around the world for the decision to release him on compassionate grounds after he had served eight years of a 27-year sentence.
At the time, medical experts advising the Scottish prison service said he was close to death. But Prof. Roger Kirby, a London prostate cancer specialist, said 59-year-old al-Megrahi is likely taking a cutting-edge hormone treatment and “could live much longer, for several more years because of this drug.”
Kirby, a consultant urologist at the Prostate Cancer Center in London, said doctors in Scotland would have been unaware of the new hormone-based therapy abiraterone, which was recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is still not available in Europe.
“I remember seeing the shots of him boarding the airplane and coming off in Tripoli and he looked very ill, he was definitely in trouble,” Kirby said. “The mistake they made was putting a definite time frame of how long it was going to be, the prognosis of three months or less. They got it wrong.
“He has long outlived the speculative three-month prognosis, and it appears he may continue to do so for a while yet. I strongly suspect that this drug has been central to that.”
Al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer, is the only person convicted over the Lockerbie bombing, Britain’s worst terrorist attack.