U.K. Pols Balk at Senate's Lockerbie Inquiry
Updated at 7:04 a.m. Eastern.
Scottish government officials have declined a request to attend a U.S. Senate hearing into the circumstances surrounding the release of the Lockerbie bomber.
The Scottish minister who authorized the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi said Friday he wouldn't attend the hearings because he has no new information to offer.
Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill said he has "no information to provide" to the U.S. Senate foreign relations committee.
BP PLC said that CEO Tony Hayward was also asked to attend the hearing but had not made a decision about the invitation.
The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations wrote to MacAskill and the Scottish Prison Service's medical chief, Andrew Fraser, to attend the hearing in Washington on July 29.
A spokesman for the Scottish government confirmed Thursday that the invitation to MacAskill and Fraser had been turned down.
Sen. Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, wrote to First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond, saying that the invitation was to help the senators better understand why Scotland decided to free Lockerbie bomber al-Megrahi from jail last year and send him home to Libya.
In particular, the senators are probing whether an oil exploration deal between oil giant BP and Libya influenced the decision to release al-Megrahi.
The semi-autonomous Scottish government insists there was no pressure from BP to free al-Megrahi, most recently in a letter sent to Foreign Relations chairman Sen. John Kerry.
"In order to demonstrate that due process was followed, we published all the key documents related to the decision where permission for publication was given," wrote Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond. "The only significant documents that we have not published are US Government representations and some correspondence from the UK Government, where permission was declined."
Megrahi was convicted of the 1988 bombing of a U.S. airline that slammed into the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, most of them Americans.
He served eight years of a life sentence in a Scottish prison, but was released last August on compassionate grounds because doctors said he was cancer-stricken and had only three months to live. He is still alive nearly a year later, and that has infuriated many people on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Meanwhile, the BBC and Sky News reported that former British justice secretary Jack Straw had also been invited to the Senate hearing.
Straw said in a statement he had not received any formal invitation, but commented that it was "highly unusual" for the U.S. to inquire into the British decision.
"It is in my experience highly unusual for the legislature of one sovereign state to conduct an inquiry into decisions of another sovereign state," he said.
Straw was, nonetheless, said to be considering the invitation.
BP spokesman Mark Salt also confirmed that Hayward had received an invitation to the same hearing.
Speaking from the oil giant's London headquarters, spokesman Mark Salt told CBS News that BP had "received the invite and are considering it."
He gave no indication as to whether there was a timeframe in which Hayward would need to accept or refuse the invite.
The chief executive's position at the company is unchanged, Salt said, despite a report in The Times two days ago that he would step down within the next 10 weeks.
"We believe he's leading the company in a robust and strong way, and has the full support of the management and the board," Salt told CBS News.