My opinion misinterpreted: Lockerbie bomber’s doctor

LONDON - A cancer specialist who attended on the freed Lockerbie bomber has said that his opinion on Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s health was misinterpreted and that he was not involved in letting him go free.

Two physicians paid by Libya - cancer specialist Karol Sikora and tumour specialist Ibrahim Sharif - agreed that al-Megrahi’s death was “likely” within three months. A third doctor, Jonathan Waxman, said al-Megrahi did not have long to live.

Al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, was the main accused in the Dec 21, 1988, bombing of the Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York. All 243 passengers and 16 crew members were killed in the blast, while 11 people in Lockerbie in Scotland died as large sections of the plane fell around the town.

Al-Megrahi served just over eight years of his sentence in Scotland’s Greenock Prison, before being diagnosed with prostate cancer and released on compassionate grounds Aug 20, 2009.

Sikora, medical director of CancerPartnersUK and dean of Buckingham University business school, has denied that he succumbed to pressure from Libya to agree that al-Megrahi had under three months to live so that he could be returned to Libya on compassionate grounds, the Guardian reported Sunday.

He said he would have made his evidence “more vague” over the Libyan’s health if he had known his opinion would have been treated as fact and used to justify the decision of his release.

“It’s not like in the films when the doctor says ‘I’m sorry you have three months to live’. There’s a huge spectrum for every clinical situation. When I was asked ‘Is he likely to die in three months?’, my opinion was that he was,” he said.

“What I find difficult is the idea I took the key and let him out. I provided an opinion, others provided an opinion, and someone else let him out. That decision of compassionate release is nothing to do with me. No one asked me, ‘Should we let him out?’ All they said was when do you think he will die?”

There has also been speculation that al-Megrahi never had cancer, but Sikora said he had no doubts. “Initially I thought he had 18 months, but when I saw the data, the blood tests and X-ray reports and spoke to the prison doctor, who had observed the pace of the disease, I thought it would be much quicker.”

Al-Megrahi’s longevity should not be too much of a surprise, Sikora said.

“Here’s a man who has got no hope of leading a normal life suddenly going back home to his house, his kids and family. There is anecdotal evidence that this sort of thing can improve the length of life just by giving someone something to live for.”

The Scottish government has so far denied that the expert evidence from the doctors influenced its decision.