Abdelbaset al-Megrahi 10 August 2009 that he had terminal prostate cancer. On his return to Libya, al-Megrahi was initially hospitalized then allowed to leave on 2 November 2009, taking up residence in a villa in Tripoli. He died on 20 May 2012, two years and 9 months after his release. Several legal experts as well as the UN observer at the Lockerbie trial have vehemently challenged the verdict that convicted Megrahi, while Ulrich Lumpert, the Mebo AG engineer who testified to the validity of a key piece of evidence, admitted in an affidavit to lying in court and stealing the object from
Hans Köchler's Lockerbie trial observer mission Brown, reiterating his call for a public inquiry into the Lockerbie case and insisting that UN-appointed legal experts (from countries other than the UK, US and Libya) should be involved in such an inquiry. In the June 2008 edition of the Scottish lawyers' magazine "The Firm", Köchler referred to the 'totalitarian' nature of the second Lockerbie appeal process saying it "bears the hallmarks of an 'intelligence operation'." Köchler's reports as UN-appointed international observer of one of the most controversial criminal trials in British history have led to a global debate on the role of NGO observers in the context of