LONDON — The uproar in Britain over the release of the only person convicted in the Lockerbie bombing gathered momentum on Monday, with critics saying at an emergency session of the Scottish Parliament that the Scottish justice secretary, Kenny MacAskill, had brought shame on Scotland and jeopardized its relations with the United States.

The fury in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, echoed indignation in the United States from President Obama; the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III; prominent senators; and relatives of those who died on Pan Am Flight 103 when it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 270 people, including 189 Americans. The release has developed into the most abrasive issue between Britain and the United States in years, and, opposition critics said in Edinburgh, one that could damage Scotland’s tourism and investment from the United States.

Annabel Goldie, of the opposition Conservatives, said the minority government of Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, could have spared the country the opprobrium by transferring the prisoner, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, to a safe house or a hospice in Scotland, where he could have received care for the terminal cancer that Mr. MacAskill cited in freeing him. Mr. Megrahi, 57, a former Libyan intelligence agent, was flown to Libya from a Scottish prison on Thursday. The compassion cited by Mr. MacAskill in justifying his decision could have been better served by keeping him in Scotland, Ms. Goldie said, than by having “a convicted terrorist being feted as a hero in Libya to a backdrop of waving Saltires,” Scotland’s blue-and-white flag.

Mr. MacAskill sought to fend off the attacks, saying Mr. Megrahi’s release was approved solely because of his illness and not because of “economic considerations” relating to Libyan oil deals, as opposition politicians and newspaper editorials in Britain have suggested. The government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown ducked for cover, declining to say whether it supported the decision to return Mr. Megrahi home.

With Mr. Brown on vacation and the British Parliament in summer recess, the government seemed intent on trying to keep at a distance from the turmoil in the hope that the issue would lose its potency by the time Parliament returns in the fall. A prominent Conservative lawmaker, Liam Fox, described Mr. Brown’s role since the bomber’s release as that of “the invisible man.”

With his silence, Mr. Brown has appeared eager to draw a veil over negotiations with Libya in the past five years in which, it was previously acknowledged, oil deals and Mr. Megrahi’s release were central to the agenda. Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, a son of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, said in a television interview on the plane carrying Mr. Megrahi home that his release was “always on the negotiating table” when oil and gas deals were discussed with Britain. Colonel Qaddafi promised when he met Mr. Megrahi that Britain would be rewarded for his release.

Peter Mandelson, Britain’s business minister and a close aide to Mr. Brown, said over the weekend that he had discussed Mr. Megrahi twice this year in meetings with the younger Mr. Qaddafi. But Mr. Mandelson said there was no quid pro quo linking oil deals to the release.

But his assertions came into doubt after The Sunday Times of London reported details of a letter that it said Ivan Lewis, a junior Foreign Office minister, had written to Mr. MacAskill two weeks before the release saying there was no legal impediment to sending Mr. Megrahi to Libya under a prisoner transfer agreement that Britain and Libya ratified in April.

“I hope on this basis you will now feel able to consider the Libyan application in accordance with the provisions of the prisoner transfer agreement,” Mr. Lewis wrote, according to the newspaper.

In his remarks to the Scottish Parliament, Mr. MacAskill hinted at something that many critics of the Brown government had suggested — that it hid behind a veil of ambiguity and evasion in its dealings with the Scottish authorities, so as to encourage Edinburgh to approve the bomber’s return home under the prisoner transfer agreement without Mr. Brown and his ministers having to take responsibility for the decision themselves.

Mr. MacAskill said he had received a perfunctory answer this summer when he wrote to Jack Straw, justice minister in the Brown government, asking the government to “make representations or provide information” regarding the proposed release. “They declined to do so,” he said. “They simply informed me that they saw no legal barrier to transfer and that they gave no assurances to the U.S. government at the time. They declined to offer a full explanation. I found that highly regrettable.”

He contrasted the British reply with what he had been told weeks before his decision when he met with American officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who as deputy attorney general oversaw issues relating to the Megrahi trial before it began in 2001. He said Mr. Holder had been “adamant” that Britain had given Washington assurances that any sentence imposed at the trial would be served in Scotland, and that he had been told the same by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. MacAskill said that the conflicting responses in London and Washington left him uncertain as to what had been agreed to by the two governments, but that he was convinced that “the American families and government had an expectation, or were led to believe, that there would be no prisoner transfer and the sentence would be served in Scotland.” He said “many of the American families” had spoken of “the comfort they placed on these assurances” when he talked with them in a video conference before his decision.

Accordingly, he said, he had decided to deny Mr. Megrahi’s application for a prisoner transfer and to approve his return to Libya under compassionate grounds, which he described as an act of “mercy” for a dying man.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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