ALAN COWELL | NYT NEWS SERVICE

SOME time back, a reporter visiting Libya made a phone call to an American there whom the authorities wanted to keep quiet, in public at least.

Almost before the reporter had lowered the handset, the phone rang.

If the journalist persisted with his overtures, said an official who had secretly monitored the conversation, he would be dealt with by “the Libyan method.” There was no ambiguity about what that might mean.

In the 1980s, Col Moammer Qaddhafi ran what Dana Moss, an expert on the relationship between Libya and the United States, called “a rogue regime which used terror as its main tactic of foreign policy.” The tally of atrocities stretched from the bombing of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin in 1986 to the downing of airliners.

Even before the visit to Tripoli, the same reporter had met in Hamburg with a German gunrunner who freely admitted arranging a shipment of Libyan weapons destined for the Irish Republican Army.

But nothing in that catalogue of terror paralleled the events of December 21, 1988, when a bomb smuggled onto Pan Am Flight 103 exploded above the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground.

Of the dead, 189 were Americans.

The event spread shock, trauma, grief and horror.

Its scars cut deep into the families of the dead, turning them into victims, too.

Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, who was 17 when her father was killed in the bombing, said recently, “There is a piece of me and everyone else in my family that died that day with him.” The attack symbolised the very worst of what Qaddhafi has since tried to disavow.

And when the only person convicted in the bombing, the former Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbasset Ali al Megrahi, was released early from a Scottish prison on Thursday on compassionate grounds, it raised many questions, not just about the nature of justice, but also about Qaddhafi’s ambitions and the doggedness with which he has sought to shed the outlaw image he brandished in the 1980s.

While he has not personally accepted blame, Qaddhafi’s government has paid $2.7 billion to the Lockerbie families and lesser amounts to the victims of other atrocities – part of the bounty the Libyan leader has offered in return for an imperfect rehabilitation.

Formally, he has abandoned his nuclear ambitions, rejected terrorism and sealed contracts with Western oil companies.

In 2003, Libya begrudgingly took responsibility publicly for “the actions of its officials” in the Lockerbie bombing.

But, almost 21 years after the bombing, the legal assignment of guilt rests exclusively with Megrahi, released because, the Scottish authorities concluded, he will die soon from cancer.

“His absolute priority in the little time he has left is to spend it with his family in his homeland,” said his lawyer, Margaret Scott – a remark that drew the anguished riposte from the victims’ families that their loved ones were denied such indulgence.

When Megrahi was released, the moment brought a flawed conclusion to a judicial process under which the 57- year-old was tried in 2001 and sentenced to a minimum 27 years in prison for mass murder.

The outcome brought no solace either for American families who wanted him to serve his full sentence, or for the British families who had generally accepted Megrahi’s protestations of innocence, but sought full disclosure of the conspiracy.

Nothing, of course, will bring back the victims.

But the question that suffused Megrahi’s release was how their memory might best be served and how those who endured their loss might find some kind of respite or comfort.