Contrasting portraits of a terrorist spy and a family man
THE Libyan regime at first refused to hand over Megrahi and his colleague Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah at Libyan Arab Airlines after the pair were indicted for mass murder by Scottish and American prosecutors in 1991.
Instead, they were placed under house arrest in Tripoli with an offer to try them in Libya if sufficient evidence existed.
Prosecutors claimed Megrahi, the head of security at the airline, was a member of the ISO – the Libyan equivalent of the KGB – with further allegations that he arranged the bombing as an act of revenge for US President Ronald Reagan’s attack on Tripoli in 1986.
At around this time, Megrahi and his wife Aisha lived for a period in his father’s modest whitewashed house in Tripoli’s suburbs. The couple, married in 1982, had five children.
The case against him also alleged that he was a director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli, a role the FBI said gave him the necessary cover to spy for the Libyan Intelligence Services.
Numerous reports in 1992 claimed he and Fhimah, who was later acquitted, had been executed by the Libyan authorities.
The two were then paraded before the world’s media by the Gaddafi regime.
While the two accused continued to remain protected in Tripoli, they moved on to the 10 “most wanted” on the FBI’S list of fugitives, with claims Megrahi held at least four Libyan passports and used up to nine aliases.
Following a compromise agreement, they were put on trial at an international court, Camp Zeist in The Netherlands, before three Scottish judges in 2001.
Born in Tripoli on April 1, 1952, Megrahi spoke English as well as Arabic, having studied in America and visited the UK on a number of occasions.
He once said he visited Britain four or five times during the 1970s, beginning with a nine-month spell as a student in Cardiff in 1971, studying at the former Rumney College of Technology, where he took a marine engineering course.
Following his conviction, Megrahi’s wife and children moved to Scotland to be closer to HMP Barlinnie in Glasgow, where he started his 27-year sentence.
They lived
in a
five-bedroom detached house in Newton Mearns, near Glasgow, bought by the Gaddafi International Foundation, an organisation headed by the Libyan leader’s son Saif.
Family members visited him regularly in prison with daughter Ghada, 27, holding part of her wedding ceremony inside Barlinnie.
Megrahi was later moved to HMP Greenock.
All of his children have spent varying periods of time in Scotland. Khalid, now 24, studied IT at Glasgow Caledonian University and son-in-law Mohamed took law at Glasgow University.
By the time he was freed in 2009 to return to Libya, the children had returned to live in the Libyan capital Tripoli, all having experienced life in Scotland during their formative years.