Huge crowds have welcomed Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of carrying out the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, as he returned home to Libya, Al Jazeera's Clayton Swisher reports.

Al-Megrahi, who is suffering from terminal prostate cancer, was freed from a Scottish jail on Thursday on compassionate grounds.

However, the decision has prompted an angry reponse in the United States, whose nationals accounted for the majority of the 270 people killed in the bombing of Pan Am 103.

Washington has called his release a "mistake", while many of his victims' families have complained that al-Megrahi is being shown the mercy that he never showed to them.