Thursday 27 October 2016

Libya “not involved in any way” in Lockerbie bombing

[What follows is the text of a report published today on the Al Arabiya English website:]

Ahmed Gaddaf al-Dam, the special envoy of the former Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi, has denied that his country was involved in any way in the bombing of a US airline plane over the village of Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.

In a series of exclusive interviews with Al Arabiya’s Political Memory show, Gaddaf al-Dam says that he visited the main suspect Abdel Basset Megrahi who had sworn on the Quran that “neither he nor Libya had anything to do with it.”

On the other hand , Gaddaf al-Dam also denied any knowledge of the of the bombing of a French airliner over Niger in 1989 telling Al Arabiya’s Taher Barakeh: “The French plane is another issue, I don’t have any information regarding that subject.”

However, he stressed that the bombing of a Berlin cafe could have Libyan prints over it. The operation that targeted Labelle Caffe [RB: usually referred to as the LaBelle Disco] which killed two US soldiers and a Turkish woman was a reaction to the raids on Tripoli in 1986, saying that: “Libya never forgets its aggressors, sooner or later, the country retaliates.”

Libya’s former special envoy said that his country did not support any military coup, but rather defended national liberation movements. He revealed that Libya extradited three Sudanese opponents who were organizing a coup against President Jaafar Nemiri to the Sudani Government on the condition that they would not be executed.

Nevertheless , Nemiri did not respect his promise , which led “to a stressful relationship between the two countries”.

*The second episode of the Political Memory interview with Ahmed Gaddaf al-Dam can be viewed in Arabic.

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