TIMES ONLINE: Special forces have been training Libyan soldiers under a Government deal with Colonel Gaddafi, despite his regime having funded many of the IRA’s worst attacks.
SAS soldiers said there was a “weary rolling of the eyes” when they learnt that they would be passing on some of their skills to members of the Libyan infantry.
In the 1980s and 1990s Libya supplied the IRA with Semtex used in at least ten attacks, including the bombings of Harrods in 1983 and Warrington and the City of London ten years later. It was also used by the Real IRA at Omagh in 1998.
Libya also supplied machine guns and anti-aircraft missiles fired at British troops in Northern Ireland.
“The IRA was our greatest adversary. Now we are training their backers. There was a weary rolling of the eyes when we were told about this,” an SAS source told The Daily Telegraph.
“A small SAS training team have been doing it for the last six months as part of this cosy deal with the Libyans,” said another.
A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesman said: “We have an ongoing co-operation with Libya in the field of defence”.
This had been the case since the former rogue state announced in 2003 that it would abandon development of weapons of mass destruction. The Ministry of Defence refused to comment. >>> Sadie Gray | Saturday, September 12, 2009
MAIL ONLINE: The SAS is training Libyan troops, it emerged last night.
The elite special forces unit has been passing on its combat expertise to Colonel Gaddafi's soldiers for the last six months.
The move, another sign of the growing relationship between the UK and the oil-rich country, has appalled military veterans who recall how Libya supplied the Provisional IRA with guns and explosives to kill British soldiers.
Though the Ministry of Defence refused to comment, the Foreign Office confirmed last night: 'We have got an ongoing co-operation with Libya in the field of defence.'
The spokesman denied there was any connection with the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds last month.
The first moves towards setting up the training agreement are believed to have begun after Tony Blair visited Libya as Prime Minister in 2004.
However, the deal was only finalised and officially approved by Gordon Brown earlier this year. It is believed that a team of between four and 14 men is training the Libyans in counter-terrorism techniques, including covert surveillance.
But not everything that the SAS has learned from fighting Islamic terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan is expected to be passed on.
The agreement is bound to devastate families of the Lockerbie victims and further damage relations with America. >>> Ryan Kisiel and Claire Ellicott | Saturday, September 12, 2009
