Mick Hartley

The Libyan leader is playing tough over the case of the Benghazi six:

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has rejected calls for the release of six foreign medics sentenced to death for infecting children with HIV/Aids.

Those who committed crimes must accept the consequences, he said….

Colonel Gaddafi stressed the “the independence of the Libyan judicial system”, and he rejected what he called “Western intervention and pressure in this affair”.

Whether he’ll stick to that position remains to be seen, but it’s now going to look like weakness if he backs down.

Is there an element of revenge for Lockerbie in all this?

Gadaffi also remains bitter about the pariah status he acquired after the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Earlier this year Libya said Bulgaria should pay the families of the children $2.7bn (£1.8bn) in compensation – which is exactly the sum paid by Libya for the 270 lives lost in the Pan Am 103 bombing.

Many, including some of the victims’ families, continue to believe that the Lockerbie investigation was subject to political pressure, and Libyan Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, eventually convicted for the crime, was little more than a scapegoat. Paul Foot, who published numerous pieces in Private Eye on this, was the most eloquent and persistent of those who believed in a cover-up:

There is, in my opinion (not necessarily shared by the families), an explanation for all this, an explanation so shocking that no one in high places can contemplate it. It is that the Lockerbie bombing was carried out not by Libyans at all but by terrorists based in Syria and hired by Iran to avenge the shooting down in the summer of 1988 of an Iranian civil airliner by a US warship. This was the line followed by both British and US police and intelligence investigators after Lockerbie. Through favoured newspapers like the Sunday Times, the investigators named the suspects – some of whom had been found with home-made bombs similar to the one used at Lockerbie.

This line of inquiry persisted until April 1989, when a phone call from President Bush senior to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned her not to proceed with it. A year later, British and US armed forces prepared for an attack on Saddam Hussein’s occupying forces in Kuwait. Their coalition desperately needed troops from an Arab country. These were supplied by Syria, which promptly dropped out of the frame of Lockerbie suspects. Libya, not Syria or Iran, mysteriously became the suspect country, and in 1991 the US drew up an indictment against two Libyan suspects. The indictment was based on the “evidence” of a Libyan “defector”, handsomely paid by the CIA. His story was such a fantastic farrago of lies and fantasies that it was thrown out by the Scottish judges.

In Britain, meanwhile, Thatcher, John Major and Blair obstinately turned down the bereaved families’ requests for a full public inquiry into the worst mass murder in British history.

It follows from this explanation that Megrahi is innocent of the Lockerbie bombing and his conviction is the last in the long line of British judges’ miscarriages of criminal justice. This explanation is also a terrible indictment of the cynicism, hypocrisy and deceit of the British and US governments and their intelligence services. Which is probably why it has been so consistently and haughtily ignored.

Foot, of course, had his own far-left axe to grind, and was inclined to see conspiracies everywhere. He could be completely mistaken, as he was in the case of James Hanratty. On the other hand he may just have been on to something, the ramifications of which are playing out now in Libya.