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By Ashraf Abdul Wahab
Tripoli, 8 March: Interior Minister Fawzi Abdelal has said that Britain must answer questions about its relationship with . . .[restrict]the Qaddafi regime before UK police would be allowed to visit Libya to investigate the 1992 Lockerbie bombing.
Speaking to local media, he said that Libya had for the moment “closed all the doors” to the British police coming to Libya to investigate the Lockerbie bombing. Any agreement on allowing them to come at some future date depended “on answers from Britain to questions concerning its relations with the previous Qaddafi system”.
In relation to the Lockerbie issue and, later, the release of the accused, Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi, he asked: “Didn’t the United States and Britain accept millions of dollars from the Qaddafi regime as the price to close the case?
He said he wanted to know the reasons behind the rapprochement between Britain and the Qaddafi regime in 2004. Why had the British government improved its relations with Qaddafi, he asked. Had something happened between the former Libyan regime and the British government end their former mutual suspicion and antagonism?? “Didn’t the British Prime Minister Tony Blair visit Libya more than once?”
Abdelal stressed that he was not anti-British. Libya, he said “doesn’t harbour any enmity towards the British people”. Quite the contrary he said, calling Britain a “pro-Libyan nation”. Indeed, he suggested that British politicians and the British public were as interested as Libyans in the Blair-Qaddafi relationship.
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