Relatives of
the victims of a Libyan bomb attack on an airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, more than 20
years ago told Libya’s ambassador
Thursday that they want more answers, not more money, in their “search for
justice.”
Frank Duggan,
president of the Victims of Pan Am 103, tried to reassure Ambassador Ali
Suleiman Aujali* that the families of the 270 victims of the bombing support
British authorities in their efforts to open a fresh investigation with the
help of the new government in Libya.
“I want to
assure you that the families of the US victims of this bombing have no
intention of seeking monetary compensation. Our efforts were never about money
but instead were a search for justice,” Mr Duggan wrote in a letter to the ambassador.
British
Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt this week informed Parliament of
“apprehension in some parts” of Libya’s National Transitional Council that
London is after more compensation.
He insisted
that the British effort is “about finding out the truth of the matter.”
Only one man
was convicted of the bombing, but authorities always have suspected more
Libyans were involved. (…)
Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was killed last year in the
uprising that toppled his regime, never admitted responsibility for the
bombing. However, he paid relatives of the victims $2.7 billion in restitution.
*[Here, from an article
in the Caledonian Mercury, are some
of Ambassador Aujali’s previous statements about Libya and Lockerbie:]
In 2007, Aujali is in Washington,
telling The Washington Diplomat that
Libya’s decision to accept responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing was a
“calculated economic decision” because Western sanctions were crippling the
country to the tune of $5 billion a year by depriving Libya of technology.
(...)
In 2009 Aujali wrote
in the Wall
Street Journal that
the fact that “a large and growing body of evidence that casts serious doubt on
[Abdel Baset al-Megrahi’s] conviction and suggests that an innocent man may
have been languishing in prison” had been widely under-reported by the US
media. “
“The Scottish flags they flew alongside
Libyan flags were not an endorsement of the terrible deeds of which [the then
recently released Megrahi] was accused,” he said. “They were a powerful sign of
solidarity between two very different nations that nonetheless share the value
of compassion”.
[UK relatives of Lockerbie victims are also continuing their search for
truth and justice, but along lines very different from Mr Duggan’s.]
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