Former President Nelson Mandela is to visit the Libyan man imprisoned for the Lockerbie bombing, his representative Zelda la Grange confirmed on Wednesday.
The visit to Adbdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi in prison in Glasgow, Scotland, was expected to take place early next week, she told Sapa.
Asked the reason for the visit, La Grange said: ”He (Mandela) was very closely personally involved with the whole thing. It would just be expected from him to go and see the circumstances under which the prisoner was held”.
Al-Megrahi is serving a minimum sentence of 20 years for his role in the bombing of a Pan Am Boeing 747 that exploded while flying from Paris to New York, via London, in 1988. The wreckage fell on the town of Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.
Mandela was instrumental in persuading the Libyan government to hand Al-Megrahi and his co-accused Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah over in 1999 to be tried by a special Scottish court in the Netherlands. Fhimah was subsequently acquitted. – Sapa