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Lockerbie payment 'diplomatic'
Libya agreed to compensate Lockerbie relatives to resolve a diplomatic row, not because Tripoli was behind the 1988 bombing, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said in a television interview. He told Australian television channel SBS's Dateline programme, to be aired on Sunday: "This is a peaceful settlement to resolve the problems between us."Tehran [sic] had agreed to the settlement to abide by a court ruling that found Libya guilty of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie that killed 270 people. "We, at the end, accepted the judgement that was made, even though it is not a legal judgement but a political one," Gaddafi said in a transcript of the interview released by SBS ahead of the broadcast. A special Scottish court in the Netherlands sentenced a Libyan, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, to life imprisonment for the bombing in January 2001. But Gaddafi denied Megrahi, who was controversially freed from his Scottish prison in August 2009 because he is suffering from terminal cancer and was given only months to live, was a Libyan agent. "He is not an intelligence officer. He is a university professor," Gaddafi said. And he's still alive ... Posted by: Fred 2010-02-20 |
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