WASHINGTON — British Prime Minister David Cameron rejected calls Tuesday for an investigation of the government’s release last year of an American-killing terrorist, dismissing charges that oil giant BP engineered the release to win business in Libya.
Making his first visit to the White House since taking office in May, Cameron condemned the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber, as he did a year ago while leading the Conservative Party opposition to the government led then by the Labor Party.
“This was the biggest mass murderer in British history, and there was no business in letting him out of prison,” Cameron said.
The release last year was controversial and emotional for the families of those killed when a bomb blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 270 people, 189 of them Americans.
Abdel Baset al-Megrahi was convicted in the bombing. He was serving a life sentence when Scottish authorities released him last August to return to Libya, saying he had cancer and less than three months to live. He received a hero’s welcome in Libya and is still alive.
Cameron said he has seen no evidence that BP pressured the government to release the terrorist in exchange for Libyan oil contracts.
“I haven’t seen anything to suggest that the Scottish government were in any way swayed by BP,” Cameron said at a joint news conference at the White House with President Barack Obama.
“They were swayed by their considerations about the need to release him on compassionate grounds — grounds that I think were completely wrong,” Cameron said. “I don’t think it’s right to show compassion to a mass murderer like that. I think it was wrong.”
Lacking any evidence of a prisoner-for-oil swap, he said, “I don’t need an inquiry to tell me what was a bad decision. It was a bad decision.”
Obama declined to press for an investigation but said he’d welcome it.
On Afghanistan, Cameron said that he and Obama reaffirmed their joint commitment to training Afghan army and police forces so that U.S. and British forces can withdraw.
