The revelation that police officers from Northern Ireland are involved in the anti-terrorism training of Libyan police forces provoked a storm of protest on Friday.
The ironic twist to the intricate web of Anglo-Libyan relations in the wake of the release of the Lockerbie bomber came amid controversy over compensation demands for victims of alleged Libyan-sponsored terrorism in Northern Ireland.
Relatives of victims of bombings by the former Irish Republican Army (IRA) terrorist organization are demanding compensation from Libya on the grounds that the explosives used by the IRA in the 1980s and 1990s came from Libya.
The Libyan government has rejected negotiations over the compensation demands, saying they were for the courts to decide.
Libya’s links with the IRA can be traced back to 1972 when Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi first praised the group as an ally in the “struggle against western imperialism.”
Qaddafi later provided the IRA with weaponry and Semtex explosives for their armed campaign against British rule which lasted more than 30 years and claimed more than 1,000 lives.
Following the 1998 Northern Ireland Peace Agreement the IRA renounced terrorism, while dissidents unhappy with the exchange of guns for politics remain active.
The latest revelations shed a further light on the complex history of Anglo-Libyan relations that lay behind the release from a Scottish jail a month ago of Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the Libyan man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing.
Senior Protestant politicians and relatives of IRA victims reacted with shock to the news that two police officers from Northern Ireland had been involved in anti-terrorism training in Libya over the past two years.
The participation of officers from Northern Ireland in the ongoing training scheme was confirmed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland on Friday.
Nigel Dodds, a member of parliament (MP) for the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), said the one police officer currently still in Libya should be recalled while the issue of compensation was being addressed.
“I think there needs to be a thorough review of all the circumstances of how he got there in the first place, and I think until this matter of compensation and Libyan redress towards the victims is addressed then I think this is an area which needs to be put on hold and the officer there withdrawn,” Dodds said.
William Frazer of the victims’ group Families Acting for Innocent Relatives (FAIR) called the news “unbelievable.”
“I am that shocked by this. I am finding it hard to take in. Here we have the police out training the people who trained the IRA and supplied the weapons to murder their colleagues, it’s just unbelievable. You couldn’t write the script for this, and if you did, it would be Monty Python,” Frazer said.
“Without Libya, the IRA could not have done what they did in Northern Ireland, there is no doubt about that,” he said, blaming British Prime Minister Gordon Brown for what happened.
“Our government has been doing things behind our backs and it’s all down to money. They are not doing this for nothing, there will be money at the bottom of it somewhere,” he said.
<< But Shaun Woodward, Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary, insisted there had been nothing unusual about the PSNI being asked to help abroad and all legislative requirements had been met. “It is not unusual for the PSNI to be asked to support the National Police Improvement Agency in work in foreign countries ... All the legislative requirements were met in the case of the recent secondment to Libya. The row over the police training followed reports last week that officers of Britain’s elite Special Air Services (SAS) regiment had been passing on skills to Libyan soldiers for the past six months. Those revelations last week sparked immediate speculation about a link with the al-Megrahi release. The first moves towards setting up the training agreement were reported to have begun after former prime minister Tony Blair visited Libya in 2004. Libya later officially announced that it would renounce developing so-called weapons of mass destruction. “We have ongoing co-operation with Libya in the field of defence, but to suggest that this is part of any deal related to Megrahi is simply untrue,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said. dpa at mt
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