US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted it would be “absolutely wrong” for the Scottish government to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan convicted for loading a bomb aboard a Boeing 747 in 1988, killing a total of 270 people.

“I just think it is absolutely wrong to release someone who has been imprisoned based on the evidence about his involvement in such a horrendous crime,” Hillary Clinton said in press reports, published today (19 August).

The US Secretary of State made this “uncharacteristically undiplomatic” comments, as the BBC correspondent in Washington called them, after a Scottish court allowed Megrahi to drop his appeal, opening the way for his possible return to Libya on humanitarian grounds. Megrahi is said to be dying from prostate cancer.