[This is the headline over a report published yesterday in the Maltese newspaper The Times. It reproduces a report that featured in one of the two disappearing posts on this blog. The report reads in part:]
The United States would "encourage" any new Libyan government to help a new investigation of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, a top US official said.
"I would encourage them, we would hope that they would do that," Deputy US Secretary of State James Steinberg told Democratic Senator Robert Menendez during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Libya.
But Steinberg repeatedly sidestepped Menendez's push to make US diplomatic recognition of any government to replace embattled strongman Moamer Kadhafi contingent on cooperating on a new probe into the attack.
"We share the importance that you attach to it," the diplomat said, but it would be better for Libya to do so of their own accord "rather than because we impose the commitment."
Menendez said he had met with senior Libyan opposition figure Mahmud Jibril, who handles foreign policy for Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) and discussed the issue.
"He indicated that, once a new government is formed, that they would be willing to cooperate with the United States on a new investigation" into the Lockerbie bombing, said the senator. (...)
Scottish prosecutors, who as part of a devolved administration operate independently from the British government in London, have said that they are still investigating the bombing.
[Any genuine new investigation should be warmly welcomed. But I fear that the outcome of an investigation such as is here envisaged would be pre-determined.]
MISSION LOCKERBIE, 2011, (google translation, german/english):
ReplyDeleteFor a new pliers-birth in the "Lockerbie-Affair", the intended "New Libya Regime" should aid Lockerbie rehearses.
That's all we needed --- hi ?
It's also easier and faster, the Scottish Justice finally should open the *files of the Scottish Criminal Cases Reappeal Commission (SCCRC) and the document under National Security (PII). *Which said there were six grounds where it believed a miscarriage of justice may have occurred...
by Edwin and Mahnaz Bollier, MEBO Ltd. Switzerland. URL: www.lockerbie.ch
I'd have thought a prerequisite for the US recognition of a new Libyan government would most certainly be to agree not to open up a new investigation or even worse to admit that the Lockerbie bombing was the work of Libya.
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