John on the Sunset Coast, regarding the question of whether Megrahi is guilty, I would suggest you look into the case a little and you would then be better placed to reach an informed opinion. I will start you off with a short resume, but don't rely on it - more authoritative stuff is readily available.

1) A US warship shoots down an Iranian civilian airliner, killing 290 people (or murdering them, as the Iranian government put it at the time). I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it made Iran very cross for some reason, especially when footage went around the world showoing American crew members cheering their achievement.

2) Iran swore to knock out 10 American airliners in retaliation.

3) A few months later, the Lockerbie atrocity, which the US admin promptly blamed on Iran.

4) The US admin continued to blame Iran until the looming gulf war required the US to moderate its relations with Iran. At that time Libya was seeking to rehabilitate itself a little with the west.

5) Two suspects were identified, partly as a result of CIA intelligence, both of them in Libya and both readily offered up (or sacrificed) by Gaddafi.

6) The case against one suspect didn't stand up to scrutiny and was thrown out. The case against the other, Megrahi, was far more compelling. In essence it was that he had been identified by a Maltese shopkeeper as the guy who had bought items that finished up in the same suitcase as the bomb. That identification evidence has been in question since the start. Oneof the trial judges described the Maltese shopkeeper as "not the full shilling," and anyone who has any experience of misscarriages of justice knows it is unsafe to rely on identification evidence on its own.

The senior Scottish law prof who devised the formula of a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands has serious doubts about Megrahi's guilt. So has the UN's observer at the trial. So has the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission, which does not lightly accept the possibility of misscarriages. And not least, several British relatives of victims believe Megrahi is innocent or at least that he could not have acted alone. And none of them, as far as I have heard, believe that Megrahi's conviction solved the case.