LAST year a cancer specialist said the Lockerbie bomber would be dead within three months of his release. Now it could be 10 years or more.
Karol Sikora, who assessed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi for the Libyan authorities almost a year ago, said it was “embarrassing” that he had outlived his three-month prognosis.
The Scottish government provoked outrage from the US when it released Megrahi from prison in August last year on compassionate grounds because he is suffering from terminal cancer.
Megrahi is the only person convicted of the 1988 bombing of a US Pan Am jumbo jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, which left 270 people dead.
But The Sunday Times claimed yesterday that Dr Sikora, the dean of medicine at Buckingham University in southern England, was the only expert the Libyan authorities could find who would agree to put the three-month estimate on Megrahi’s life.
The advice of two other experts was ignored after they said Megrahi could live for 19 months. Dr Sikora said: “There was always a chance he could live for 10 years, 20 years . . . But it’s very unusual.”
He said the Libyan authorities had made it clear to him that if he concluded Megrahi would die within months, it would greatly improve his chances of being released from jail in Scotland.
“Three months was the critical point. On the balance of probabilities, I felt I could sort of justify (that),” Dr Sikora said.
He denied he came under any pressure, but admitted: “It is embarrassing that he’s gone on for so long. There was a 50 per cent chance that he would die in three months, but there was also a 50 per cent chance that he would live longer.”
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