Relatives of the Lockerbie bombing victims are split over what should be the fate of the only person ever convicted of the massacre, as he received a visit from the Scottish Justice Secretary to assess a request for his release on compassionate grounds.
Broadly speaking, there is a divide among European and American relatives over whether Libyan national Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who is terminally ill with prostate cancer, should be released.
Jim Swire, the father of 24-year-old Flora, is one of those who believes he should. Speaking to The Times yesterday, he said he was delighted that Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill made an unprecedented visit to the bomber in prison on Wednesday.
The visit follows consultation which included a meeting with Dr Swire, whose daughter was one of 270 victims who died when Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York blew up over Scotland on December 21, 1988.
Dr Swire does not believe the version accepted by the specially-set-up Netherlands courts in 2001 through which Mr Megrahi was convicted. In fact, he believes both the former Libyan secret service official and Malta - which was implicated as the place from where the bomb left - are innocent.
Mr al-Megrahi, 57, is serving his 27-year term at Greenock Prison in Scotland.
In May, the Libyan authorities applied for his repatriation under a controversial prisoner transfer deal agreed by Tripoli and the UK. However, if he is released under this agreement, he will have to drop the appeal he filed against his conviction and a whole corpus of fresh evidence, which would dismantle the case against Mr Megrahi as well as the Maltese connection.
Instead, Mr Megrahi, who has always insisted he wished to clear his name before returning home, has tried his luck for the second time with a request for release on compassionate grounds. If released in this way, his appeal would continue unhindered.
Dr Swire, like many others, is lobbying for the Libyan to be granted compassionate release precisely because he wants the appeal to go on.
"If he stops the appeal, the truth is less likely to surface. Mr al-Megrahi is an innocent man as I still believe that he has nothing to do with the case. The prisoner exchange also raises questions of human rights and the Human Rights Committee is looking into this," he said.
But not all relatives are of this opinion. Kathleen Flynn, from New Jersey, who lost her son JP in the atrocity, was quoted as telling The Times of London yesterday: "When are we going to come to the conclusion that what happened happened and we're going to punish the people who did it? My feeling is that when someone has committed a crime as serious as this, why would you decide he should go someplace else? He should be punished in the country that he performed the crime in."
In May, she told this newspaper she would be horrified if Mr Al-Megrahi were released to the Libyan government. In fact, it is thought that American victims' families are considering a judicial appeal if Scotland agrees to any form of transfer.
"This man is not a political prisoner, he is a murderer and there is a big difference... to me it is inconceivable how this idea (to release him) could be entertained," she said. "I can assure you we will not just say au revoir... we have been successful in the past 20 years at making sure justice is done."
Mr MacAskill has the final say over whether Mr al-Megrahi should be transferred or released. Dr Swire confirmed that he had met with the Justice Secretary and had explained to him why he thought Mr al-Megrahi should be released on compassionate grounds.
The first stage of the appeal has already been heard in Edinburgh, but no ruling is expected any time soon as one of the judges presiding over the case had to undergo heart surgery.
The ongoing appeal was ordered by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission in 2007, after a four-year investigation concluded that Mr al-Megrahi may have suffered a "miscarriage of justice".
Fresh documentation to be presented by the defence team is said to put in doubt the original testimony of key Maltese witness Tony Gauci, who said he sold clothes to Mr al-Megrahi from his shop in Sliema. It was said the suitcase containing the bomb on the Pan Am flight included those clothes.
But the most high profile of the sceptics is the former Scottish judge who was the architect of the original Lockerbie trial, Robert Black, who insisted with The Sunday Times in May that there was never any evidence that the bomb which claimed the lives of 270 people actually left from Malta.