Mick Hartley

Gaddafi’s son confirms the Lockerbie link:

A deal with the UK that could see a Libyan convicted for the Lockerbie bombings extradited home and a French arms agreement were key to last week’s release of six foreign medics, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s son said in comments published Wednesday.

Former Libyan secret agent Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who was jailed for the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, won the right to a new appeal in June after a court ruled he may have been wrongly convicted.

In an interview with France’s Le Monde newspaper, Saif Al Islam Gaddafi said Tripoli had drawn a link between Megrahi’s situation and that of the five nurses and doctor jailed for infecting children with HIV/AIDS.

Asked whether the two cases were connected, Saif Al Islam replied: “Yes. We established a link.”

He told Le Monde he hoped Megrahi would soon be sent back to Libya.

“We will soon have an extradition agreement with the UK,” he said, referring to a memorandum of understanding on an extradition deal signed with Libya during a visit by former prime pinister Tony Blair in May.

The UK’s Foreign Office immediately denied there was any link.

“There is no link between Mr. Megrahi and the release of the Bulgarian and Palestinian medics,” a spokesman said, adding that there is no extradition agreement between the UK and the north African country.

The spokesman noted that Blair “signed a memorandum of understanding with the Libyan government on looking [at] and exploring further judicial cooperation.”

Saif Al Islam also said the medics’ release – in which France played a key role – had 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.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy Wednesday said there had been no quid pro quo in connection with the release of the medics and that military contracts had not played a role.

A day after the medics’ release, 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.

So not only have the Libyans managed to turn a national scandal into a triumph: we now have a situation where they’re cheerfully providing what’s almost certainly a truthful account of deals reached behind the scenes, while the French and British governments, unable to admit they’ve been party to such sordid machinations, bluster and dissemble. Yes indeed, Gaddafi will be very pleased.