(Boryana Katsarova/AFP/Getty)
Posted on 08/01/2007 9:49:24 AM PDT by Stoat
(Boryana Katsarova/AFP/Getty)
The Bulgarian nurses flew home earlier this month
Libya believes it has reached a deal with Britain that could see a Libyan convicted for the Lockerbie bombings extradited home in return for last week’s release of six foreign medics, Muammar Gaddafi's son was quoted as saying today.
Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, a former Libyan secret service agent, is in prison in Scotland after being convicted over the 1998 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie.
In June al-Megrahi won the right to a new appeal, after the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission ruled that he may have been wrongly convicted and referred his case back to the High Court.
In an interview with France’s Le Monde newspaper today, Saif ul-Islam Gaddafi said that Tripoli had drawn a link between Megrahi’s judicial situation and that of the five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor jailed for infecting children with the AIDS virus.
Asked whether the two cases were connected, Saif ul-Islam replied: “Yes. We established a link.”
He also told Le Monde that he hoped Megrahi would soon be sent back to Libya.
“We will soon have an extradition agreement with Britain,” he said, referring to a memorandum of understanding on an extradition deal signed with Libya during a visit by Tony Blair in May.
Saif ul-Islam said that the medics’ release - in which France played a key role - had also paved the way for the signing of major arms contracts with France.
“With the French, we have been in negotiations for a long time. We asked Sarkozy to accelerate things. Now that the nurses’ case is settled, a golden opportunity has arisen,” he said.
A day after the medics’ release, President Sarkozy travelled to Tripoli where he signed an agreement with Libya pledging to cooperate on several nuclear energy projects, including building a reactor for water desalination.
The nuclear deal has been criticised by environmentalists as a potential proliferation risk, but according to Le Monde, “the heart of the matter” was not the nuclear project, but a wide-ranging defence agreement.
“Firstly, the accord covers joint military exercises, of course. Then we will purchase anti-tank Milan missiles from France, for about 100 million euros I believe,” the Libyan leader's son was quoted as saying.
“Afterwards, there is a plan to manufacture arms, to maintain and produce military equipment. You know this is the first agreement by a Western nation to supply weapons to Libya.
“Representatives of Thales and Sagem are in Libya as we speak,” he said, referring to two French defence and electronics manufacturers.
As head of the Gaddafi Foundation, which negotiated the nurses' release and a $400 million compensation deal for the sick children’s families, Saif ul-Islam repeated the claim that “no Libyan money was paid to these families”.
“What I can say is that the French sorted things out. The French found the money for the families. But I don’t know where they found it,” he said, adding that Libya had got “a good deal” out of the case. Mr Sarkozy and the European Union both denied paying any financial compensation for the medics’ freedom.
Asked whether Qatar, which helped negotiate the deal, had served as a financial intermediary, Saif ul-Islam replied:“We did not ask questions. We did not want to embarrass our friends."
Lockerbie bomber 'to return to Libya' after just seven years in prison
I’m trying to imagine how the families of the 9/11 victims would feel if Mohammed Atta had somehow survived, been jailed and was now being released and flown back home......
see, this seriously makes me sad. I thought this guy (sarko) was good news.
This is how the DemocRATS want us to treat every terrorist we apprehend.
Don't know how much to trust an article that can't even get the year right. It was 1988; not 1998.
Agreed in principle, although my bet is that they would also want to dispense with that ugly little "jailing the perp" bit in the middle......it's disrespectful to Muslim cultural sensitivities to force them to be away from their families, after all, and all so-called criminals are wrongly convicted anyway because American "justice" is so thoroughly corrupted with Biblical references, racism and Capitalist underpinnings. And ultimately it is the United States that's responsible for creating all of these poor, downtrodden people that we wrongly label "terrorists" anyway.
"puke"
The Lockerbie bombing was in 1988, not 1998. Either a typo or this journalist needs to get his facts straight.
Could they send him home on a Pan Am flight?
And it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Western "nation" involved is France.
That would be fitting, wouldn't it? There's still the Pan Am Clipper, and they do charters, according to their website.
And it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Western "nation" involved is France.
It seems that it will take considerably more than Sarkozy's election to remove the cancerous, self-destructive and deeply-ingrained French trait of supporting terrorists and various evil enterprises throughout the world.
This is interesting in that there appears to be a concerted effort by Libya and the West to resolve any and all remaining political disputes/issue, even to the point Britain apparently wants to give this terrorist back to them. The end of the nurse’s state-sponsored kidnapping is another example of this.
IOW, I do not believe for a second the timing of this news about possible reversal of conviction if a coincidence.
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