Tripoli ‘ready to cooperate’ with Britain over Lockerbie

TRIPOLI, Libya – Prosecutors in Tripoli said Wednesday, October 21, they were ready to cooperate with Britain after it identified new Libyan suspects in the bombing of an airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988.

“We have received nothing so far” in terms of requests from Britain for any help, said Seddig Essour, head of investigations in the prosecutor’s office.

“There have been many agreements made regarding the Lockerbie case, but we’ll have to decide how best to meet these new demands when we receive them,” he told AFP.

A spokesman for Tripoli’s justice ministry said “the department is ready to cooperate with investigators in the Lockerbie case if a formal request is received”.

Scottish prosecutors said on Thursday that they have identified two new Libyan suspects in their investigation into the bombing of Pan Am flight 103.

Libya, which was ruled by late dictator Moamer Kadhafi at the time of the Lockerbie bombing, has descended into chaos since he was toppled and killed in 2011.

It now has two rival governments, including the one that seized Tripoli last year backed by Islamists and the other internationally recognised one that fled to eastern Libya after losing control of the capital.

The only person ever convicted in the Lockerbie bombing is former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi, who died in 2012 protesting his innocence.

Scottish media named one of the two new suspects as former intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi and the other as Abu Agila Mas’ud.

Senussi is behind bars in Libya after being sentenced to death in July for crimes committed during the 2011 uprising, while Mas’ud is also reportedly in custody in the North African country.

Libya admitted responsibility for the bombing in 2003 and Kadhafi’s regime eventually paid $2.7 billion (2.4 billion euros) in compensation to victims’ families. – Rappler.com