Gadhafi Admitted Libyan Lockerbie Role -Paper
May 14 18:14
BERLIN (AP)--Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi acknowledged to a top German
diplomat that the North African country had a role in the 1980s bombings of
an airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, and a Berlin discotheque, a German
newspaper said Monday, citing a German government memo.
According to the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily, the memo recounts a report
to U.S. and German leaders including U.S. President George W. Bush in
Washington by Michael Steiner, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's
foreign policy adviser, on a meeting with Gadhafi.
Steiner "reported about his talks with Gadhafi in Libya. The latter
accepted that Libya was involved in terrorists acts (La Belle, Lockerbie)"
the paper said, citing the memo, which it said was passed to lawyers
representing survivors and relatives of those killed in the attack on the
La Belle disco in 1986.
A German government spokesman declined to comment on the report, to be
published Tuesday, after consulting Steiner.
Schroeder, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Bush's security
adviser Condoleeza Rice were also present at Steiner's briefing, the paper
said.
Schroeder visited the U.S. at the end of March.
In 1999, Gadhafi handed over for trial two Libyans suspected of blowing
up a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie in 1988, killing 270 people. Abdel
Basset Ali al-Megrahi, an intelligence officer, was sentenced in January to
life in prison for planting an explosive device aboard the plane. The
second defendant, a Libyan airline official, was freed.
Libya has denied responsibility for the bombing and insists that
al-Meghrahi was innocent and the court was pressured by Britain and the
U.S.
German courts have yet to convict anyone of the disco bombing, which
injured 230 people.
U.S. intelligence, which was monitoring radio transmissions from the
Libyan embassy in former East Berlin at the time of the bombing, traced the
attack to Libya, leading then U.S. President Ronald Reagan to order
retaliatory air strikes on Tripoli and the port of Benghazi.