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Abdelbaset Mohmed Ali al-Megrahi (Arabic: عبد الباسط محمد علي المقرحي, ʿAbd al-Bāsaṭ Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Maqraḥī; born 1 April 1952) is a Libyan citizen, alleged former intelligence officer, former head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines and former director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. On 31 January 2001, Megrahi was convicted, by a panel of three Scottish judges sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, of 270 counts of murder for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on 21 December 1988 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. His co-accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was found not guilty and was acquitted.
Several legal experts as well as the UN observer at the Lockerbie trial have vehemently challenged the verdict that convicted Megrahi, while Ulrich Lumpert, the Mebo AG engineer who provided the key piece of evidence, has admitted in an affidavit to having earlier lied in court and having stolen the piece of evidence after the attack from his employer.
Megrahi was freed on compassionate grounds by the Scottish Government on 20 August 2009 following doctors reporting on 10 August 2009 that he had terminal prostate cancer and was expected to have around three months to live. Presently Al-Megrahi is living in a villa in Tripoli. Questions were raised about the reason for his release and whether his conviction might have been quashed had he appealed it.