Now that the Scottish government has released Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the murder of 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, the appeal he had filed in a Scottish court will never be heard by a judge.

The firestorm of anger that greeted the decision to release Mr. Megrahi, who is terminally ill, on compassionate grounds on Thursday is clearly based on the belief that he was responsible for the bombing, but doubts about his conviction, some of which formed the basis for the legal appeal he filed and then withdrew at the request of the Scottish government as a condition of his release, surfaced years ago. Despite what some readers of The Lede who posted comments yesterday seem to have assumed, those doubts existed outside the murky precincts of the Internet where wild conspiracy theories are spun out.

In a review of the case on Wednesday, the Scottish broadcaster STV reported that Mr. Megrahi’s appeal was filed in 2007 after “a four-year review by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Committee (S.C.C.R.C.), who concluded that a miscarriage of justice could have occurred.”

On Wednesday, The Guardian published video of the Rev. John Mosey, the father of one of the British victims of the bombing, who expressed his disappointment that halting Mr. Megrahi’s appeal before it went to court meant that the public would never hear “this important evidence — the six separate grounds for appeal that the S.C.C.R.C. felt were important enough to put forward, that could show that there’s been a miscarriage of justice.” Mr. Mosey added, “We’d like to know what they are, where will they point?”

In an interview included in this video report from Britain’s Channel 4 News on Thursday, Mr. Mosey called for a new public inquiry into the bombing and said of Mr. Megrahi, “From the evidence I saw and heard in the court, and what I’ve read and seen, I doubt that he had any involvement in it at all.”

A Scottish reader of The Lede’s previous post on Mr. Megrahi’s release drew our attention to this video, of a BBC interview with the father of another British victim of the bombing, Dr. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed. Speaking as Mr. Megrahi was being driven from prison, Dr. Swire also called for a public inquiry and praised the Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill for his “brave” decision. He added: “I don’t believe for a moment that this man was involved, in the way that he was found to have been involved.”

On Thursday, The Guardian’s Scotland correspondent, Severin Carrell, reported some of what was in the appeal that has now been abandoned:

Megrahi’s legal team say they have proof that a key witness, a Maltese shopkeeper called Tony Gauci, wrongly claimed that Megrahi had bought clothes allegedly found in the suitcase bomb on Pan Am Flight 103. They allege Gauci was paid a $2m (£1.2m) reward for his evidence, which followed more than 20 police interviews. They imply he was coached by detectives. They claim new scientific analysis raises substantial doubts about the location of the bomb. They allege that compelling evidence that it was planted by a Syrian-backed Palestinian cell based in Germany, Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, has been ignored.

Another Guardian correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, reported in 2001, just months after the trail, that there were doubts about the Maltese shopkeeper’s evidence even then.

Readers who want to know more about the case against Mr. Megrahi, and the suggestions that he may have been wrongly convicted, can consult two documentaries: “Shadow Over Lockerbie,” made for American public radio by John Biewen and Ian Ferguson in 2000, and “Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie,” made for the BBC in 2008.

The complete audio of “Shadow Over Lockerbie” and a complete transcript are available on the Web site of American Radio Works.

Oya Newspaper/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Parts of “Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie” are available on the BBC’s Web site — including this extraordinary video interview with Saif al-Islam el-Qaddafi — the son of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — who flew to Libya with Mr. Megrahi on Thursday and raised the released man’s arm in triumph after they landed in Tripoli. In the interview, the man who some believe will be Libya’s next leader called the families of the Lockerbie victims “very greedy” and said, “Instead of wasting their time blackmailing us,” they should work with the Libyan government “in order to find the real criminal who was behind that attack.”

“Conspiracy Files: Lockerbie” was broadcast on Canadian television last night. Copies of the video can be found on video-sharing Web sites, including YouTube.

The Times of London visited Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi at his home in Tripoli on his first day of freedom. In an interview, Mr. Megrahi told the English newspaper’s correspondent Martin Fletcher that he expected to live no more than three months but would prove his innocence before his death Mr. Fletcher reports: