Libyan Terror Figure. On 31 January 2001, Megrahi was convicted, by a panel of three Scottish judges sitting in a special court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, of 270 counts of murder for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on 21 December 1988 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. His co-accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was found not guilty and was acquitted. Megrahi unsuccessfully appealed his conviction in January 2001. In June 2007 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission granted Megrahi leave to appeal against his Lockerbie bombing conviction for a second time. After initially appealing, Megrahi abandoned his second appeal in August 2009 as an ongoing appeal would have prevented him from being moved to Libya under the Prisoner Transfer Scheme which was thought to be a possibility in 2009. 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 his employer, after which he gave it to one of the crime investigators. Megrahi was freed on compassionate grounds by the Scottish Government on 20 August 2009 following doctors reporting on 10 August 2009 that he had terminal prostate cancer and was expected to have around three months to live. On his return to Libya, al-Megrahi was initially hospitalized but was allowed to leave on 2 November 2009, taking up residence in a villa in Tripoli. In October 2011 Al-Megrahi gave an interview from his bed in which he claimed that he had only days, weeks or months to live.