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The man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing has died of cancer at his home in Tripoli, according to his brother. Video: guardian.co.uk Link to this video

David Cameron has dismissed the possibility of a UK inquiry into the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – the only person convicted of involvement in the Lockerbie plane bombing – who died in Tripoli on Sunday.

The prime minister said the court case which convicted Megrahi was properly conducted and news of his death should “be a time to remember the 270 people who lost their lives in what was an appalling terrorist act”.

Scotland‘s first minister Alex Salmond, whose government took the decision to release the former Libyan intelligence officer from his life sentence in jail in August 2009 on compassionate grounds, said however it was still open to relatives of Megrahi, who always pleaded his innocence, or campaigners to lodge a fresh appeal against his conviction 11 years ago.

He added: “The Lockerbie case remains a live investigation, and Scotland’s criminal justice authorities have made clear that they will rigorously pursue any new lines of inquiry. Scotland’s senior law officer the Lord Advocate recently visited Libya, and we have been offered the co-operation of the new Libyan authorities. It has always been the Crown’s position that Mr Megrahi did not act alone but with others.

“It is open for relatives of Mr Megrahi to apply to the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission to seek a further appeal. And the best, indeed the only, place for guilt or innocence to be determined is in a court of law.”

While families of those who died in the atrocity in 1988 gave differing reactions to the news – some welcoming Megrahi’s death and others supporting his claims of innocence – Libyans largely expressed relief rather than mourning.

Megrahi’s death from prostate cancer was confirmed by his brother Abdelnasser, who was at the house in Tripoli where his dead brother lay. He told the Guardian: “I don’t want to talk right now, I am very upset, I don’t really feel like talking. He’s dead, that’s it, what more do you have to know?”

At the time of his controversial release in 2009, doctors estimated Megrahi had around three months to live. The decision prompted accusations that it had been linked to UK attempts to forge trade deals with Libya, then still led by Muammar Gaddafi, and sparked outrage in the US – home to most of the victims on board the flight – after Megrahi returned to Tripoli to a hero’s welcome.

Cameron, in Chicago for a Nato summit, was in opposition when Megrahi was released. “I’ve always been clear he should never have been released from prison”, he told journalists. Questioned about the possibility of an inquiry, he insisted: “This has been thoroughly gone through. There was a proper process, a proper court proceeding and all the rest of it. We have to give people the chance to mourn those that were lost.”

For Labour MP Russell Brown, who represents the Dumfries and Galloway constituency, including Lockerbie at Westminster, there were “still so many unanswered questions” about the bombing. Megrahi’s death “means that the possibility of getting all the truth about the disaster may have died with him”.

In the US, Carole Johnson, 68, from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, mother of Beth Ann Johnson, a 21-year-old American student on the plane, said: “This is three years too late. While I’m happy that he is dead, long ago I left it in the hands of God. I know exactly where he is, and I know it is quite hot. I’m sure he and Gaddafi are reunited again.” Frank Duggan, president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, said: “He was an unrepentant murderer and now I hope he will finally see justice.”

However Briton Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the bombing, said Megrahi’s death was a “very sad event”. Swire, a member of the Justice for Megrahi group, said: “I met him face-to-face in Tripoli in December last year, when he was very sick and in a lot of pain.

“But he still wanted to talk to me about how information which he and his defence team have accumulated could be passed to me after his death.” Swire added: “Right up to the end he was determined – for his family’s sake, he knew it was too late for him – how the verdict against him should be overturned”.

A joint statement from Justice for Megrahi – signed by 42 public figures and journalists including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former BBC chief news correspondent Kate Adie, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Scotland’s most senior Catholic, and Professor Noam Chomsky – demanded an independent inquiry into Megrahi’s conviction. His prosecution was based on “a fantastical tale” with no direct or forensic evidence to support a tenuous circumstantial case, they said.

Three judges who tried the case without a jury at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands were under “tremendous pressure” to return their guilty verdict of January 2001. “The prosecution case against [Megrahi] held water like a sieve … We have accusations of the key witness having been bribed for testimony; a multitude of serious question marks over material evidence, including the very real possibility of the crucial fragment of printed circuit board [from the bomb] having been fabricated; discredited forensic scientists testifying for the prosecution; crown witness testimony being retracted after the trial and, most worryingly, allegations of the crown’s non-disclosure of evidence which could have been key to the defence.”

In the streets around Megrahi’s luxurious home, a villa set behind high walls in Tripoli’s upmarket Hai Damascu neighbourhood, many said his death was a reminder of an era they preferred to forget. “All Libyans know his face, and we know that he put us back maybe 10 years,” said Arfa Mohamed, a 25-year-old cashier at a nearby fast-food shop. “Thanks to him it gave the outside world a view of Libyans as terrorists.”

For ordinary Libyans his position as a security official with the Gaddafi administration, and the expensive villa he was given, marked him out as part of the former regime.

“Was he innocent or guilty, only God can know,” said Mohammed Ferake, in a hardware store close to Megrahi’s villa. “I never saw him, his family never shopped here. The [Lockerbie] case did not help Libya … After that, Libya was given a bad name around the world. Because of that, all that Libyans were known for was Gaddafi and his oppression.”

Megrahi’s death also touches on the increasingly controversial subject of the prevalence of former regime officials in Libya’s transitional authorities. While the Gaddafi-era security apparatus was destroyed in last year’s war, much of the administration remains intact, albeit under new masters.

By FRANCES D’EMILIO, Associated Press
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1 hour ago 

ROME (AP) — A bomb exploded on Saturday outside an Italian high school named after the wife of an assassinated anti-Mafia prosecutor, killing one student and wounding at least seven others, officials said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, and police were trying to determine who had planted the bomb. But an anti-Mafia prosecutor said it didn’t appear to be the kind of attack that organized crime has carried out in Italy. The bombing also followed a spate of attacks against Italian officials and buildings by a group of anarchists.

The device went off a few minutes before 8 a.m. in the Adriatic port town of Brindisi in the country’s south just as students milled outside, chatting and getting ready for class at the mainly all-girls Francesca Laura Morvillo Falcone vocational institute. Saturday is a school day in much of Italy.

The school — which prepares students for jobs in fashion, tourism and social services — is named in honor of Morvillo, a judge who died along with her husband, anti-Mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, in a 1992 highway bombing in Sicily by the Cosa Nostra.

The student killed by the bomb was Melissa Bassi, 16, known to her friends in Brindisi for her sunny smile and dream of becoming a fashion designer, said Franco Scoditti, the mayor of the nearby town of Mesagne. She died of her wounds at a hospital, said Brindisi civil protection agency official Fabiano Amati.

One of the shaken students who witnessed the attack told reporters that a wounded girl, her hair charred, screamed the name “Melissa, Melissa” when she realized her friend was severely hurt. Bassi, along with several friends, had just gotten off a bus from Mesagne that took them to their school.

Amati said at least seven students were hospitalized, but some news reports put the figure at 10.

Graziella Di Bella, the health director at Perrino Hospital, said most of them suffered burns and shrapnel-like wounds, and several were undergoing surgery.

“The explosion sent out fragments and flames … pieces of iron,” Di Bella told Sky TG24 TV. She said four psychologists were working with the students. “One of the (injured) girls asked me: ‘What do we have to do with this?” Di Bella said, adding the students were feeling a sense of “disorientation, terror” and anger.

“It’s pure terrorism,” said Italy’s national anti-Mafia prosecutor Piero Grasso after consulting in Brindisi with investigators. He sounded angry as he left the scene of the bombing. “May no one touch our kids!” he shouted as he got into a car.

Dr. Paola Ciannamea, a Perrino Hospital physician who helped treat the wounded, told reporters that one of them was a teenage girl who was in a grave but stable condition after surgery.

Premier Mario Monti, from the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit in the United States, said he hopes the wounded quickly recover.

Anti-Mafia prosecutor Cataldo Motta, based in the nearby port of Lecce, told reporters there were no claims of responsibility. He added that the bombing didn’t appear to be the work of organized crime, since fuel and not dynamite, the Mafia’s traditional choice of explosive, was used. Motta said the “international terrorism” angle was unlikely, but stressed that investigators had not ruled out any hypothesis.

Italy has been marking the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Sicilian highway that killed the prosecutor and his wife, but it was unclear if there was an organized crime link to Saturday’s explosion.

Interior Minister Anna Maria Cancellieri, in charge of domestic security, said she was “struck” by the fact that the school was named after the slain hero and his wife, but she cautioned that investigators at that point “have no elements” to blame the school attack on organized crime.

“It’s not the usual (method) for the Mafia,” she told Sky in a phone interview. The Sicilian-based Cosa Nostra usually targets specific figures, such as judges, prosecutors, turncoats or rival mobsters in attacks, and not civilian targets such as schools.

Saturday’s bombing is an attack of “unprecedented cruelty. The big problem now is to get intelligence” on the bombing, said Cancellieri.

National police chief Antonio Manganelli told Sky TG24 that Italy’s “best investigators” had been dispatched to Brindisi.

Outside the school, textbooks and notebooks, their pages fluttering in the breeze, and a backpack littered the street near where the bomb exploded. At the sound of the blast, students inside the school ran outside to see what had happened.

Officials initially said the bomb was in a trash bin outside the school, but later the Italian news agency ANSA said the device was placed on a low wall ringing the building and near the bin. The wall was damaged and charred from the blast. Sky TG24 said the device included three containers of fuel.

The school’s principal, Angelo Rampino said the bomb, which reportedly had a timer component, went off at a time when students are known to be flocking to school. “It was done to kill the girls,” said Rampino .

The bombing follows a spate of attacks against Italian officials and government or public buildings by a group of anarchists, including the shooting and wounding of an official from a nuclear engineering firm, which is part of a state-controlled company. An anti-nuclear anarchist group that previously had targeted Italy’s tax collection agency claimed responsibility for the shooting.

Authorities have said the Italian anarchists have worked in close contact with Greece-based anarchists. Brindisi is a major point of departure for ferries between Italy and Greece, but there was no immediate indication from investigators of any Greek link.

The attacks and threats lodged against authorities prompted the government earlier in the week to assign bodyguards to 550 individuals, and deploy 16,000 law enforcement officers nationwide.

Brindisi is a lively port town in Puglia, the region in the southeastern “heel” of the Italian boot-shaped peninsula. An organized crime syndicate known as the Sacred United Crown has been traditionally active there, but crackdowns have been widely considered by authorities to have reduced the organization’s power.

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Ahhh, cheeseburgers. Diplomacy’s comfort food.

President Barack Obama’s nod on Friday to visiting French President François Hollande’s youthful fondness for the fast-food sandwich was not the first time that leaders from both countries have turned to cheeseburgers at a potentially tense moment.

The June 2004 Group of Eight Summit brought together President George W. Bush and French President Jacques Chirac a little more than one year after the invasion of Iraq, which deeply divided the two allies. American lawmakers angry, that Paris had opposed the war, voted to rename “French fries” as “Freedom fries” in their cafeteria. Air Force One pointedly served “Freedom Toast.” (Neither food is known as “French” in France).

At a joint press conference, Bush thanked Chirac for his warm welcome on a recent visit to France. “The food was superb, the hospitality warm.” Chirac more than returned the favor: “I’d like to thank once again the President for the hospitality here. The President was kind enough to mention French cuisine, but I can tell you that over the last few days, this cuisine here in America was certainly on a par with French cuisine and I ask the President to convey my thanks to the chef.”

“He particularly liked the cheeseburger he had yesterday,” Bush said with a broad grin.

“It was excellent,” Chirac said appreciatively, drawing laughter from assembled reporters. Fast-forward eight years: Obama hosted Hollande for their first-ever meeting amid tensions over the French president’s campaign promise to pull French combat troops out of Afghanistan by the end of the year. The two leaders addressed that potential, errrr, “beef.” And they talked about cheeseburgers.

As the meeting began, Obama referred to Hollande’s youthful adventures in the United States, which he traveled in 1974 on a grant from a business school. The future president of a country famed for its food studied McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, both unknown at the time in France. ” I could have made a fortune in cheeseburgers, but I finally chose politics,” he told the New York Times.

After offering Hollande a “hearty congratulations” on his election victory, Obama noted that his guest “actually spent some time in the United States in his youth, studying American fast food–and although he decided to go into politics, we’ll be interested in his opinions of cheeseburgers in Chicago.”

“I want to thank President Obama for his vast knowledge of my life before I became a politician. And I want to say nothing that might suggest that cheeseburgers might have any flaws,” replied Hollande.

“I just want to remember that cheeseburgers go very well with French fries,” joked Obama.

“No declaration about French fries,” Hollande said, in English, as the room emptied out.

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By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press
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1 hour ago 

BEIRUT (AP) — A car bomb in the parking lot of a Syrian military compound killed at least nine people Saturday, the latest in increasingly frequent bombings in the country’s major cities to target the regime’s security services.

President Barack Obama said the members of the Group of Eight industrial nations support the U.N.’s peace plan for Syria, but added that it had not taken hold fast enough.

In Damascus, top United Nations’ peacekeeping and military officials met with Syrian officials to try to salvage that peace plan, which has been marred by daily violence and dismissed by the opposition as unrealistic. A cease-fire that was supposed to start last month has never really taken hold, undermining the rest of international envoy Kofi Annan’s plan, which is supposed to lead to talks to end the 14-month crisis.

Saturday’s suicide bombing struck the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, blowing holes in the walls of nearby buildings and sending up a plume of smoke that stretched across the horizon.

Video broadcast on Syrian state TV showed damaged buildings, smoldering cars and trucks flipped upside down. Debris filled a street that was stained with blood. The station said a suicide bomber detonated a vehicle carrying 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) of explosives and that the blast left a crater five meters (15 feet) wide and more than 2 meters (6 feet) deep.

The state-run news agency SANA said the blast hit the parking lot of a military residential compound, while an opposition group, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported that the bomb went off close to the city branches of the Military Intelligence Directorate and Air Force Intelligence.

Syria’s state news agency posted photos of U.N. observers — some of the about 260 currently in Syria as part of Annan’s plan — visiting the blast site.

Attacks like the one in Deir al-Zour, which once served as a transit hub for militants heading to fight U.S. forces in neighboring Iraq, have raised fears that militant Islamists are taking advantage of chaos in Syria to carry out al-Qaida-style attacks.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attack. The government blamed it on “terrorists,” who it says are behind the uprising against President Bashar Assad.

A spokesman for the city’s rebel military council denied the opposition was behind the attack and blamed the blast on the regime.

“This is not our style because we work to protect civilians and their homes from the bullets and shells of Assad’s gangs,” Mohammed Attallah said in a video posted online Saturday. “So how could we carry out such a huge criminal act that killed citizens and caused great material damage?”

A group calling itself the Al-Nusra Front has claimed previous attacks through statements posted on militant websites. Little is known about the group, although Western intelligence officials say it could be a front for a branch of al-Qaida militants from Iraq operating in Syria.

The country’s last major bombing targeted an intelligence building in Damascus on May 10. It struck during morning rush hour and the high death toll — some 55 people — made it the deadliest attack of the uprising.

Saturday’s bombing was the third so far in May. April and March saw two major bombings each, while the three previous months all had one each. Most of the attacks have been near security-related buildings in Aleppo and Damascus, Syria’s two largest cities, which have largely stood by Assad throughout the uprising.

The revolt started in March 2011 with mostly peaceful protests calling for political change. As the government cracked down on dissent, many in the opposition took up arms to protect themselves and attack government troops. The U.N. said weeks ago that 9,000 people had been killed. Hundreds more have died since.

Violence has dropped since the U.N. observers began arriving in the country as part of Annan’s peace plan, which has been marred by continued daily violence and dismissed by the opposition as unrealistic.

At a meeting outside Washington of the Group of Eight industrial nations, Obama said the G-8 nations support the U.N. plan for Syria, but added that it has not taken hold fast enough.

World powers remain divided on how to end Syria’s crisis. The U.S. and other Western and Arab nations have called for Assad to leave power, and the U.S. and European Union have placed increasingly stiff sanctions on Damascus.

But with Russia and China blocking significant new U.N. punishments, U.S. officials are trying to get consensus among other allies about ways to promote Assad’s ouster.

“We all believe that a peaceful resolution and political transition in Syria is preferable,” Obama said Saturday in Camp David, Maryland.

In Damascus, a senior U.N. delegation that included Babacar Gaye, military adviser to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous was in Damascus on Saturday and was expected to meet with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem.

The chief of the U.N. observers in Syria, Maj. Gen. Robert Mood, and Annan deputy Jean-Marie Guehenno are also to take part in the meeting.

Ladsous told reporters Saturday that he met with some observers and “reminded them of the importance of the mission, which is basically to save lives by confirming the reduction in the level of overall violence.”

He added that a drop in bloodshed would help create conditions “that could be conducive to some political processes being started by the initiative of the joint special envoy.”

Associated Press writers Anne Gearan and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed reporting from Camp David, Maryland.

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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