Megrahi - Lockerbie bomber 'gone to’ Malta for sex'

The Libyan imprisoned for life time due to the 1988 Lockerbie bombing told prosecutors he visited to Malta constantly to have sex.

Investigators said the bomb which devastated Pan-Am Flight 103 was in a suitcase loaded on the island.

Earlier on covert papers, watched by BBC Scotland, detail the clarifications of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, 59, for his existence in Malta.

They also advise he could visit there without a passport or naming.

The Mediterranean island was key to the case which saw Megrahi found guilty, in January 2001, of killing 270 people in the bombing.

Megrahi was come back to Libya on sympathetic grounds in August, 2009 after serving 10 years of a life punishment; he has deadly prostate cancer.

He has always preserved his innocence, and a prosecution by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) found he may have undergone from a miscarriage of justice.

Its 821-page report has never been made public, but it has now been watched by BBC Scotland.

It details Megrahi's statement, recognize as a precognition, given to defense lawyers before his investigation in which he spoke about how simple it was for him to visit between Libya and Malta.

"As a Libyan Arab Airlines worker and as somebody familiar, both at Tripoli airport and at the airport in Malta," he told the lawyers, "I could get away with not utilizing a passport or an ID card at all, but easily by wearing my Libyan Arab Airlines uniform.

"This may sound outrageous but it is reality.

"If I would like to do something underground in such a way that there would be clearly no record by any means of me going from Tripoli to Malta and back again, I could do it."

A Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, known Megrahi as the man to whom he sold clothes which were afterward found in a suitcase which had enclosed the bomb.

He said Megrahi traveled his shop, Mary's House, on December 7, 1988.

Strom has surrounded that date - and was one of the causes why the SCCRC sent the case back to the Appeal Court.

But defense lawyers taken in if the genuine tribunal had known how simply Megrahi could visit unnoticed to Malta it could have reinforced the investigation case.

The SCCRC document says: "If the claimant (Megrahi) had talked to this in evidence it would have eliminated the requirement for the Crown to maintain the date of procure of the items from Mary's House as 7 December 1988."

SCCRC prosecutors who talked Megrahi in Greenock Prison find out he had a mistress in Malta whom he may have traveled twice in December, 1988 – as well as the night before the bombing.

He told them he could not have sex with his wife.

"It was likely therefore that the cause for his journey to Malta on 20 December was to meet a woman for this reason," the SCCRC report said.

"The woman in inquiry was the same one that he had recommended he might have met during his travel to Malta on 7 December.

"He had had sexual relations with her on a number of times over many years, awaiting1989 or 1990."

Megrahi was provided only three months to live when he was freed from jail in Scotland in August, 2009.