Muammar Gaddafi personally ordered the Lockerbie bombing that killed 270 people in 1988, according to his recently resigned justice minister.

The claim, if it can be corroborated, would mark a sensational development in the long and tangled story of the downing of Pan Am flight 103, in which 270 people died over the Scottish Lowlands town in the worst act of terrorism in UK history.

"I have proof that Gaddafi gave the order about Lockerbie," Mustafa Abdel-Jalil told the Swedish tabloid Expressen, but he did not describe the proof. Libya accepted responsibility for the atrocity, for which intelligence agent Abdel-Basset al-Megrahi was convicted. It also paid billions of dollars in compensation. But it has never admitted carrying the bombing out — let alone that it was on Gaddafi's direct orders. Abdel-Jalil stepped down in protest against the brutal clampdown on anti-government protests. He made the claim during an interview with the newspaper at the local parliament of an unidentified large city in Libya.

The Lockerbie affair continues to generate heated controversy, most recently when Megrahi was granted a compassionate release from a Scottish prison in August 2009 on the grounds that he was suffering from prostate cancer and would die soon. He is still alive in Tripoli.

Libya's involvement is still questioned by those who argue that the US plane was downed not by Libyan intelligence but by a Palestinian faction acting in concert with Iran, probably in retaliation for the shooting down by the USS Vincennes in 1988 of an Iranian airliner over the Gulf.

"To hide it he [Gaddafi] did everything in his power to get Megrahi back from Scotland," Abdel-Jalil was quoted as saying.

Gaddafi and his regime have been directly tied to international terrorism on many occasions over four decades. Abdullah Senussi, still his trusted enforcer, was convicted in absentia in France in 1999 for his role in the 1989 bombing of a UTA passenger plane over Niger which killed 170 people. Senussi is said to have recruited Megrahi when he was head of Libya's external security organisation.

Gaddafi also supplied arms to the Provisional IRA and to armed groups in the Middle East and far beyond. In 1984 a gunman in the Libyan embassy opened fire on demonstrators in London, killing WPC Yvonne Fletcher. That led to a 20-year breach in relations with the UK.

The key to their resumption was Gaddafi's surrender of his weapons of mass destruction programme after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, paving the way for a visit by Tony Blair and lucrative trade, investment and energy opportunities for UK business.

There was no way of independently confirming Abdel-Jalil's claim. Expressen spokeswoman Alexandra Forslund said its reporter in Libya, Kassem Hamade, taped the interview, which was conducted in Arabic and translated to Swedish.

Most of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing were Americans, and al-Megrahi's release was criticised by members of the US Congress and the victims' families. Bob Monetti, of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, whose 20-year-old son Richard was killed in the bombing, said he was glad to hear a former Libyan official say what had been clear to him all along. He said officials and the media, especially in the UK, had been in denial over who was to blame.

"If you went to the trial, there was no question about who did it and why, and who ordered it," Monetti said. Lisa Gibson, of Colorado Springs, Colorado, lost her 20-year-old brother Ken in the bombing. "I'm not surprised for him to say that Gaddafi is responsible because ultimately we know that," Gibson said.