Edinburgh, Scotland ? A judicial commission said Thursday that a Libyan agent imprisoned in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie should be granted an appeal so new evidence that he was wrongly convicted can be considered.

Some British relatives of victims welcomed the decision, saying key questions have never been answered. But American families criticized the commission’s recommendation as unfair and unwarranted.

If the appeal is granted and successful, it could undermine years of investigation, clear Libya of involvement and reopen the debate about who was behind the attack.

The report by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission will now be submitted to the Court of Appeal in Edinburgh, which will decide whether an appeal should be granted. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 55, is serving a life sentence in Scotland for the 1988 bombing, which killed all 259 people on the plane and 11 on the ground. Among the dead were 179 Americans.

Mohammed al-Zaway, a former Libyan ambassador to Britain who oversaw al-Megrahi’s case during the trial, said an appeal would “open the door of hope for al-Megrahi’s innocence.”

Attorneys for al-Megrahi, the only person convicted of blowing up the London to New York flight on Dec. 21, 1988, claim British and U.S. authorities tampered with evidence, disregarded witness statements and steered investigators away from evidence the bombing was an Iranian-financed plot carried out by Palestinians to avenge the shooting down of a civilian Iranian airliner by U.S. forces several months earlier.

In a statement summarizing its 800-page report on its three-year investigation, the commission said it “is of the view, based upon our lengthy investigations, new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”