CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands (Reuters) - For over three years, this windswept former U.S. airbase in the heart of the Netherlands was a virtual slice of Scotland.
Scores of Scottish policemen patrolled streets given names like "Strathclyde Drive" and "Tayside Street". Bewigged judges in white andscarlet silk robes manned a low-rise court called the "High Court of Justiciary".
But cars drove on the right inside Camp Zeist -- a reminder that this 10-hectare (25-acre) swatch of land was only on loan to Scotland after a U.N.-brokered compromise for two Libyans suspected of the Lockerbie bombing to stand trial at a special Scottish court on neutral soil.
Abdel Basset al-Megrahi lost his appeal on Thursday against conviction for the 1988 airliner blast over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, which killed 270 people.
The appeal ruling ended legal proceedings that began at Camp Zeist when the trial started in May 2000, and erased the "raison d'etre" of the so-called Scottish Court in the Netherlands.
The site will be returned to the Dutch defence ministry once the Scottish staff have left, but it is not yet clear what the Netherlands will use it for.
There has been wide speculation it will become a temporary home for the International Criminal Court due to be set up permanently in The Hague, though some officials say a Dutch rather than international purpose is more likely.
"SCOTTISH COURT IN MALAGA"
Camp Zeist was founded in 1910 as an aerodrome in the build-up to World War One, and was expanded and used as a German transport centre during World War Two.
It was used by the U.S. Air Force for 40 years until the end of the Cold War. The Americans left in 1994. Converting the camp cost the United States and Britain an estimated $100-200 million (70million-140 million pounds).
Megrahi was locked up in April 1999 with Libyan Al-Amin Khalifa Fahima, who was acquitted in January 2001, in a purpose-built prison at the camp near the city of Utrecht.
An August 1998 Anglo-Dutch treaty had transferred the land to Britain, and the Libyans were held in a bomb-proof underground complex beneath a former hospital the Americans built as an operating theatre.
Defence ministry officials said when the original trial ended that, just as when a Dutch landlord rents out a flat, the tenant would be expected to return it in its original state.
That would imply the Scottish being forced to tear down the detention unit, courtroom and offices they painstakingly built.
But a Dutch defence ministry spokesman on Thursday played down such a likelihood. "We're not going to make things too difficult," he told Reuters.
Megrahi arrived at Glasgow's tough 19th-century Barlinnie prison in the early hours of Friday.
Just before the appeals judgement was issued on Thursday, Scottish officials at Camp Zeist joked about a re-trial -- an appeal outcome that was always seen as an outside chance.
"If there's a re-trial, it had better be at the Scottish Court in Malaga," said one.