Scotland's compassion likely will elude this crime's families.

When Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988, killing 259 passengers and 11 people on the ground, it was the single worst terrorist atrocity ever committed in Britain—and the deadliest terrorist attack on American lives until September 11, 2001. Yesterday, the only man ever convicted of the attack left Scotland on a Libyan jet, flying safely through the same skies his victims had been bombed out of 21 years ago and arriving in Tripoli to a hero's welcome.

That man, Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, was arrested in 1999 and given a life sentence in 2001 by a Scottish court. In announcing his release, Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill intoned that "when such an appalling crime is committed, it is appropriate that a severe sentence be imposed." Imposed, perhaps—but not carried out: Megrahi served less than a third of 27 year minimum stipulated in his sentence. That works out to 11.6 days in prison for each of his victims, or a little less than 14 days if you count from the time of his 1999 arrest. There are burglars who have done more time.

Megrahi's release is being justified on compassionate grounds: He is terminally ill with an aggressive form of prostate cancer and is said to have as little as three months to live. We're not sure what additional compassion is owed to man who has never admitted his guilt, much less by a country already too compassionate to apply the death penalty to mass murderers.

Nor did we quite understand what Mr. MacAskill intended by his remark that Megrahi faces "a sentence imposed by a higher power." In this world, it makes no small difference to a man whether he ends his days in a foreign prison or in the bosom of his family and country.

Mr. MacAskill was also at pains to explain why he decided not to release Megrahi under a recent prisoner transfer agreement between Libya and the U.K., apparently out of solicitude for the views of the U.S. government and the families of the victims. We doubt those families will be consoled by a procedural gesture that ignored their demands that Megrahi be kept in jail.

Now that transfer agreement is coming into disrepute amid allegations, widely floated in the British press and strenuously denied by the government, that it amounted to a tacit quid pro quo for lucrative energy and arms deals for U.K. firms. Whatever the case, British justice will almost inevitably be tainted by the suspicion of a corrupt bargain every time a British company lands a deal in Libya.

More significantly, Megrahi's release is a reminder of what happens when terrorism is treated as a problem for the criminal justice system. Mr. MacAskill did not stint in congratulating Scotland (and himself) on the superior virtue his decision supposedly evinces. Terrorists will surely draw a different lesson about the will of the West to confront and punish them. And the compassion that is still owed those made bereft by the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 has now been tainted by a second Lockerbie outrage.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A12

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