Annan May Meet Libyans To Resolve Lockerbie Issue. Decision by Libya expected soon
By Anthony Goodman
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Wednesday he might meet Libyan officials to try to resolve the issue of bringing to trial two Libyan suspects in the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing.
Annan is due to visit North Africa next week and he told reporters: ''The question has been raised if it will be helpful for me to go down there (to Libya) and bring the issue finally to closure. I have not made up my mind yet, but it is not excluded,'' he said.
At issue is the trial of two alleged Libyan intelligence agents, Abdel Basset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, accused of planting a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over the Scottish village of Lockerbie on Dec. 21, 1988. All 259 people aboard the plane were killed as were 11 on the ground.
In August, the United States and Britain, where the suspects have been indicted, dropped their insistence on a trial in either country and challenged Libya to make good on its repeated offer to allow them to be tried before a Scottish court, under Scottish law, in a third country.
Arrangements were made for a trial in the Netherlands, but Libya had raised a number of objections, including insistence that if the men were convicted, they should not serve their sentence in Scotland but in the Netherlands.
Libyan lawyers have held lengthy discussions in recent months with the U.N. legal counsel, Hans Corell, seeking clarification of this and other issues.
Diplomats close to the negotiations said they hoped for a decision by Libya soon. They said the question of where the men would serve their sentences was now the main obstacle to an agreement.
Libya, they said, had dropped objections to the trial being held at a former military base in the Netherlands, Camp Zeist, as well as other issues raised earlier.
Annan said the Security Council had given him specific tasks ''including working with the Libyans to ensure delivery of the two to the Netherlands.''
He said Corell had done a good job working with the Libyan lawyers, adding: ''I think we have offered most of the clarifications and I had hoped we would be able to bring the issue to closure by the end of November. We are still pressing for that.''
At this point he raised the possibility of dealing with the Lockerbie question during the resumed North African trip that he interrupted earlier this month because of a crisis over Iraq.
Annan did not say where he might meet Libyan officials, but one report said it could be on the Libyan-Tunisian border. He is due in Algeria on Dec. 1-2 and in Tunisia on Dec. 3-4.
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Report: Libya Jails 3 for Lockerbie
By SALAH NASRAWI Associated Press Writer
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Three top Libyan officials have been tried and jailed in the 1988 Pan Am bombing, newspapers reported today. Libyan dissidents said the reports appear to be a political ploy by Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
An Egyptian source, who, like Libyan sources, spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said he had heard nothing about any such trials during meetings with leading officials on a just-ended trip to the Libyan capital, Tripoli.
The reported jailing comes as Gadhafi is under pressure to accept a plan to turn over for trial two other Libyans wanted for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.
U.N. chief Kofi Annan said today he is considering a trip to Libya next week that could close a deal to try Libyan suspects in the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing.
A Libyan legal team has been meeting regularly with Annan's legal counsel to discuss and clarify the U.S.-British proposal to try the suspects in the Netherlands according to Scottish law and using Scottish judges.
Because of some positive developments over the past few weeks, ''there is now a good chance that the suspects might finally be brought,'' to trial, a U.N. source said, speaking on condition he not be identified.
There is, he said, ''a sense of optimism.'' He said Annan wouldn't go to Libya unless he had a sense that a deal was possible.
After refusing for years to turn over two men for trial in the United States or Britain, Libya recently accepted in principle the proposed trial in The Hague, Netherlands, but has delayed in turning over the suspects. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, accused by the United States and Britain, allegedly were Libyan intelligence agents.
Two London newspapers, meanwhile, The Guardian and the leading Arabic daily Al-Hayat, reported today that three top intelligence chiefs at the time of the airliner bombing had been convicted and imprisoned in Libya.
The Guardian said Abdullah al-Senussi, Musa Koussa and Mohammed al-Misrati were sentenced to between five and seven years in prison earlier this month.
Quoting ''well-placed sources,'' the Guardian said the charge filed against the three was ''dereliction of duty,'' but gave no further details.
Al-Hayat's report said it had questioned Libyan Justice Minister Mohamed Belgasim al-Zuwiy about the purported trials, but he had replied only that ''trials are going on all the time.''
The Guardian and Al-Hayat suggested that the jailing of the three was aimed at blocking their testimony at a trial of the two Libyan suspects.
The Libyan dissidents said the jailings probably were a total invention leaked by Gadhafi's government. One dissident said the three men had been close associates of Gadhafi for decades and were ''too valuable for Gadhafi to dispose of them.''
The dissidents said Gadhafi's long resistance to turning over al-Megrahi and Fhimah stemmed from fear that their testimony would directly implicate his government in the bombing.
Al-Senousi was head of the Libyan intelligence service and Koussa was in charge of its foreign operations during the 1988 bombing. The third man, al-Misrati, was a senior official in the Revolutionary Committees, Gadhafi's ruling party.
Libya has been under U.N. sanctions since 1992 to force it to hand over the two suspects in the Lockerbie case. The sanctions include a ban on air links with Libya, an arms embargo and a partial ban on the sale of oil equipment.
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