Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted of involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, could soon be free. BBC report.

He is in prison in Scotland, terminally ill, and his release would be in order that he can be back with his family in Libya when he dies. An alternative would be to transfer him to a Libyan prison to complete his sentence, but that would require him to abandon an appeal against conviction which has been recommended by the Criminal Cases Review Commission in Scotland.

A New Jersey woman whose daughter died in the atrocity, said in a tv interview today that his potential release was the best argument she had ever heard for the death penalty. In the BBC report linked above, she said: "It makes me sick, and if there is a compassionate release then I think that is vile." "Vile" seems a strange way to describe an act of compassion, but other victim relatives in the US have reacted in much the same vein.

UK relatives, on the other hand, seem in the main to be relaxed about Megrahi's release, not least because many of them have serious doubts, as do many senior lawyers, about his guilt. Even if he was rightly convicted, they are of the view that he was at best a minor player whose conviction put paid to any serious quest to find those who masterminded the crime. (I don't think anyone anywhere thinks Megrahi acted alone, and there are many who think the crime should be laid at Iran's door rather than Libya's.)

Dischord within the relatives' group does not precisely follow the US/UK divide, but overwhelmingly that is where the faultline runs. The American voices I heard today sounded to me embittered, shrill and slightly irrational. Jim Swire and another Brit I saw interviewed sounded thoughtful and measured by comparison, and even... compassionate.

A comlex dilemma for Scotland's justice minister.