Gordon brown has disappeared at moments of political crisis before, but rarely has crisis been so determined to find him. The controversial decision last month to release from prison on compassionate grounds the cancer-stricken Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of the Lockerbie airline bombing of 1988, was initially a problem for Alex Salmond and Kenny MacAskill. The first minister and justice secretary, respectively, of the devolved Scottish government that let the Libyan terrorist go remain embroiled in its aftermath (see next story). But attention has inexorably crept south and settled on the question of just how and how much the British government was involved in the case.
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