THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY: MPs want to know what deal was struck over the Lockerbie bomber at a meeting in a London club in 2003 – long before either the Scottish government or Gordon Brown was involved
Tony Blair will be thrust into the controversy over the release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi with questions in Parliament over a secret meeting the then Prime Minister orchestrated that brought Libya in from the cold.
MPs are set to demand the minutes of an extraordinary cloak-and-dagger summit in London between British, American and Libyan spies held three days before Mr Blair announced that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was surrendering his weapons of mass destruction programme.
At the time of the secret meeting in December 2003 at the private Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London – for decades the favourite haunt of spies – Libyan officials were pressing for negotiations on the status of Megrahi, who was nearly three years into his life sentence at a Scottish jail.
Whitehall sources said the issue of Megrahi's imprisonment was raised as part of the discussions, although it is not clear whether Britain or America agreed to a specific deal over his imprisonment, or a more general indication that it would be reviewed.
MPs are to investigate what was promised by Britain at the talks on 16 December, and the role that Mr Blair played in the affair. Until now, the controversy over Megrahi's release last month has centred on discussions between Gordon Brown's government and the Scottish executive and Libya since 2007, with Mr Blair apparently not involved in any way.
It has also focused on claims that the deal was related to oil deals, with Jack Straw admitting yesterday that BP's interests in Libya played a "big part". But authoritative sources said the seeds for Megrahi's release were sown in 2003, when Libya made the historic agreement to end its status as a pariah, and that the focus on oil and trade was a "red herring".
Yesterday the Libyan Foreign Minister, Musa Kusa – who himself was present at the Travellers Club meeting – told The Times that Megrahi's release was "nothing to do with trade".
Two days after the meeting Mr Blair and Col Gaddafi held direct talks by telephone; and the next day, 19 December, the historic announcement about Libyan WMD was made by Mr Blair and President Bush.
At the time, the British government was in desperate need of an intelligence victory after the debacle of going to war in Iraq in the belief that it had weapons of mass destruction.
The Iraq Survey Group had just reported it had found no biological or chemical weapons. Two months after the talks, Mr Blair travelled to the Libyan desert to extend the "hand of friendship" to Col Gaddafi in a Bedouin tent, calculating that the PR coup of Libya dismantling WMD programmes outweighed American outrage.
Yet, in the end, it was revealed that Libya had not developed a nuclear- weapons capability and so did not pose as great a threat to the West as was feared. >>> Jane Merrick | Sunday, September 06, 2009
