Reporter Finds Lockerbie Bomber 'Close to Death'

Hours after Libya's rebel government refused to extradite the Lockerbie bomber, a CNN reporter found him—slipping in and out of a coma, barely alive, sustained only by an intravenous drip. Reporter Nic Robertson had come for an interview, and was stunned by the site of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi near death. "We just give him oxygen," said al-Megrahi's son Khaled. "Nobody gives us any advice." In fact rebels had looted all the medicine from their house.

"If you send him to Scotland" to finish his sentence for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which killed 270 people, "he will die by the way," said Khaled. "Here or there." An official with the rebel government was more emphatic, the Telegraph reports: "We will not give any Libyan citizen to the West,” he said. “Al-Megrahi has already been judged once and he will not be judged again ... We do not hand over Libyan citizens." Just last week, two US senators demanded al-Megrahi's extradition and called his release two years ago a “total miscarriage of justice.” (More Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi stories.)