Friday 16 December 2011

Libya to allow police to probe Lockerbie - minister

[This is the headline over a report published late yesterday evening by the news agency Reuters. It reads in part:]

The Libyan government will allow British police to go to Libya to investigate the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the unsolved 1984 killing of a policewoman in London, a British minister said on Thursday.

Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt, who held talks with Libyan ministers in Tripoli last week, said the Libyan government had given permission for British police to carry out fresh investigations into the two shadowy episodes that occurred under the rule of late strongman Muammar Gaddafi.

"I have absolute confidence that the police from Dumfries and Galloway (in Scotland) and the Metropolitan Police (in London) will be going back to Libya to get their investigations going again and they will be given a positive opportunity to do so by the Libyan authorities," Burt told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Burt, the Foreign Office minister responsible for North Africa and the Middle East, said no date had been set yet for a police visit, noting that Libyan authorities had a lot of other issues to deal with in a turbulent post-Gaddafi transition.

But he said that in his talks with Libyan Interior Minister Fawzi Abd al All and Foreign Minister Ashour bin Hayal, both had recognised the importance of the so-called "legacy" issues.

[Why Reuters is featuring this story a week after the rest of the media (see here and here) is a minor mystery. It has now been picked up on the Libya TV website.]

1 comment:

  1. I do wish the media would stop referring to the NTC as the Libyan Government and start asking when the National Transitional Council intends to hold democratic elections.

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