Lockerbie Investigators Interview Top Libyan Defector

By ALAN COWELL

Published: April 8, 2011

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Scottish police investigating the Lockerbie bombing said on Friday that they had met with the former Libyan foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, who defected to Britain and is said by officials to have held high rank in Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s intelligence services when the Pan Am Boeing 747 was blown up over Scotland in 1988.

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• Sanctions Are Dropped Against Libyan Defector (April 6, 2011)

The only person convicted in the attack, which killed 270 people — mostly American passengers on the plane — was a former Libyan intelligence officer, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, who was released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds in 2009. The Libyan authorities assumed general responsibility for the bombing in 2003 as Colonel Qaddafi sought to shed a decades-long reputation as proponent of state terrorism.

News of the renewed inquiries by Scottish authorities seemed likely to encourage relatives of those killed in Lockerbie, particularly in the United States, who have long argued that responsibility for the attack went much higher in the Libyan elite than Mr. Megrahi’s conviction might suggest.

A statement issued on Friday by Scottish police and investigators said that police and prosecutors had met Mr. Koussa “in relation to the ongoing investigation into the Lockerbie bombing” but gave no details of the discussions “in order to preserve the integrity of the investigation.”

The British authorities have said Mr. Moussa has not been offered immunity from prosecution. On Monday, the Obama administration dropped financial sanctions against him, saying it hoped to encourage other senior aides to abandon Colonel Qaddafi.

Mr. Koussa fled to Britain last week and has been meeting with British intelligence and other officials at a safe house. The Libyan authorities say his move was prompted by old age and sickness. But British officials are hoping to glean valuable insider knowledge about the workings of the Tripoli authorities as they confront a sustained uprising.

But his position in Britain is ambiguous. Members of the Labour opposition have demanded that Mr. Koussa also be investigated in relations to other issues, including Libyan arms supplies to the Irish Republican Army and the shooting in 1984 of a British police officer, Yvonne Fletcher, outside the Libyan Embassy in London in 1984.

Additionally, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, last week placed Mr. Koussa second after Colonel Qaddafi on a list of “some individuals with formal or de facto authority, who commanded and had control over the forces that allegedly committed the crimes” since Libya’s uprising began on Feb. 15.

Western leaders hailed Mr. Koussa’s defection as a turning point for the cohesion of Colonel Qaddafi’s rule.

Prime Minister David Cameron referred to Mr. Koussa’s arrival in Britain as “a compelling story of the desperation and the fear at the very top of the crumbling and rotten Qaddafi regime.”

But since then, Colonel Qaddafi’s loyalists seem to have stemmed what looked like the beginnings of a stream of high-level defections.