Libya Will Allow British Police to Visit for Lockerbie Inquiry, Briton Says

Libya Will Allow British Police to Visit for Lockerbie Inquiry, Briton Says

By RICK GLADSTONE

Published: December 8, 2011

Libya’s post-Qaddafi leaders signaled new flexibility in prosecuting the Libyan perpetrators of the Lockerbie bombing and the killing of a London policewoman during the 1980s, telling a visiting British official that British investigators would soon be invited into the country to conduct inquiries, Britain said Thursday.

Both the United States and Britain have made clear they expect the new Libyan government to help find those responsible for the attacks, and the new Libyan leaders had been giving mixed signals about their intention to cooperate.

But the British official, Alistair Burt, the Foreign Office minister, said that he had raised the raised the issue with Libya’s new foreign and interior ministers, and was “very confident” they would allow police investigators to visit Libya soon, according to a statement issued Thursday by the British Foreign Office.

A date was not set.

The unresolved prosecutions of the Libyans responsible for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans, and the 1984 killing of Yvonne Fletcher, a London police officer, by gunshots fired from the Libyan Embassy, have remained festering vestiges of an era when Libya’s behavior made it a pariah state.

The authorities in Scotland have been eager to interview Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer who is the only person ever convicted in the Lockerbie bombing. He had been serving a life sentence in Scotland but was freed to return home in August 2009 for what was described as compassionate grounds because he had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer with only a few months to live.

Mr. Megrahi is still alive and Libya’s new leaders have said he will not be re-arrested. But they have raised the possibility that Mr. Megrahi could cooperate in other lines of inquiry on Lockerbie.

Nobody was ever convicted in the April 1984 killing of Ms. Fletcher, who was among those fired on by a gunman from inside the Libyan embassy. Britain broke diplomatic relations with Libya after she was killed.

Mr. Burt is one of the highest-ranking British emissaries to visit Libya since the formation of a new government there after the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in October. Britain has since fully restored diplomatic relations with Libya and promised to help rebuild it in the aftermath of the violent revolution that broke Colonel Qaddafi’s four-decade-long grip on power.