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The wife of the Lockerbie bomber claims that her husband became a sacrificial lamb for the whole of Libya when he agreed to be tried for a crime that he says he did not commit.

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi surrendered his freedom so that his country could free itself from United Nations sanctions and improve its global image, his wife Aisha said.

Mrs al-Megrahi gave a rare interview at the family home near Glasgow, close to the prison where her husband is serving a life sentence for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that claimed the lives of 270 people in 1988.

Timeline: al-Megrahi and the Lockerbie bombing

The events from December 1988 when Flight 103 was blown up until al-Megrahi’s plea for relase on compassionate grounds

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“He sacrificed himself for the sake of an entire nation,” she told The Times, in an interview conducted in Arabic.

“They’ll never make up for the absence and they cannot make up for the sadness that has been created,” Mrs al-Megrahi said of the Libyan Government, which supports her family financially. “If they give me all the money in the world that would not make up for his absence.” She said, however, that she and her five children were still thankful for the support provided by Libya.

Mrs al-Megrahi said that she would not have let her husband leave Libya for the Netherlands in 1999 – where the Lockerbie trial took place a year later - if she had known that he would be convicted.

“I didn’t try and advise him against going because I was confident he would return,” she said. “But if I’d known we’d be here ten years later I would have told him not to go.”

Asked if she ever wished that Libya had not extradited her husband, a faint smile emerges on her face before she lowers her gaze. Her silence spoke volumes. It is the silence of a woman torn between her feelings for a man whom she fell in love with at 18 and the country that continues to put food on his family table and pay for their travel home to Libya for religious holidays.

Al-Megrahi, 56, had stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosed in September but was refused bail even though his defence team argued that he did not have long to live. The court ruled that he did not meet the requirement of having less than three months to live.

“He’s ill and he feels the pain but he is not worried because he has a tremendous amount of faith in God,” his wife said.

The move to Scotland in 2002 was difficult, she said. There were language barriers for the children, cultural differences and, of course, the hateful chants about Lockerbie.

The family home was attacked with eggs, her son Mohamed, 16, was called “terrorist” at school, and his eldest brother Khalid, 22, stays aloof at university to avoid getting into trouble.

At times she appears optimistic, then she is overcome by sombre thoughts. “I’ve lost hope,” she said. “Even if they tell me he’ll be released I won’t believe it until I see it with my own eyes. Because we’ve been let down again and again.”

Asked how her husband feels about Lockerbie’s 20th anniversary – on Sunday – she said: “He wants the world to know that he’s innocent and that he feels for those innocent lives lost in the bombing . . . because he too has a family and parents.”

richard.kerbaj@thetimes.co.uk

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