Lockerbie 'a business deal'

2003-08-16 15:40

London - A British member of parliament, long sceptical about Libya's involvement in the 1998 Lockerbie bombing, said on Saturday the fact that Tripoli had accepted responsibility for the attack still did not mean it was guilty.

MP Tam Dalyell said in an interview with the BBC the Libyans had this week accepted responsibility for the downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie purely because they were "desperate to get back into the international trading circuit".

"It is just a business deal," Dalyell said.

Tripoli handed a letter to the United Nations on Friday, which said: "Libya, as a sovereign state, has facilitated the bringing to justice of the two suspects charged with the bombing of Pan Am 103 and accepts responsibility for the actions of its officials."

'Business deal'

"He (Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi) may be so desperate to get back into the international fold that he would come to this business deal," Dalyell said.

"It doesn't follow that they did it. And indeed for the first two years (after the bombing), no-one suspected them."

Accepting responsibility for Lockerbie is one of the requirements Libya is required to meet before the UN agrees to lift the sanctions it imposed after the bombing, in which 207 people lost their lives.

The sanctions were suspended, but not formally lifted, in 1999, after Libyan handed over two of its nationals to stand trial for the Lockerbie bombing.

One of the two, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands.

Al-Megrahi is now serving his sentence in Barlinnie prison in Scotland and Dalyell is supporting his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against his conviction.

Dalyell repeated on Saturday his view that Megrahi had been made a scapegoat to get the sanctions lifted.

"We got not only the wrong man but the wrong regime," he told the BBC.

The Scottish MP is co-author of a book about the Lockerbie case called "Libya: The Struggle for Survival".

A member of the ruling Labour Party, Dalyell is the longest serving MP in the house of commons.

He is known for speaking out on controversial issues, even if his views clash sharply with those of the Labour leadership, and has been a thorn in the side of successive British governments.

- AFP