Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, was tracked down in Tripoli last night, scotching rumours that he had been spirited out of the Libyan capital.

Reporters discovered Megrahi lying comatose and surviving on an intravenous drip in a room in his family’s palatial villa.

Relatives said that he was close to death, and that looters had “stolen all his medicine”. They insisted that they were being given no help from Gaddafi loyalists. Megrahi was pictured, clearly unconscious.

His son, Khaled al-Megrahi, told CNN: “We just give him oxygen. Nobody gives us any advice. There is no doctor. There is nobody to ask. We don’t have any phone line to call anybody. We just sit next to him … he has stopped eating and sometimes he goes into coma.”. . .