London, October 05: Britain offered 14 million pounds to Libyan leader, Moammar Ghaddafi to end his support for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a new report has revealed.
According to National Archives documents seen by the British daily, The Independent, former UK premier, Harold Wilson’s Labor government offered the sum during negotiations to halt the supply of weapons from Tripoli in the 1970’s.
Wilson’s offer was part of a wider deal to settle financial claims against the UK and help open up British trade with the north African state.
The documents include a ‘personal message’ from Wilson to Colonel Ghaddafi, in which the prime minister clarified that his government was prepared to pay Libya in return for ending support for the IRA.
“I do not want to anticipate the results of the forthcoming talks, which we shall enter into in a truly constructive spirit, but it might be helpful nevertheless to mention two questions of particular importance to us,” Wilson wrote in 1975.
“The first of these concerns Northern Ireland.”
The Libyan leader has admited having supported the IRA.
However the oil-rich state has said it will resist demands for compensation over attacks carried out by the IRA, as it has already paid 1.5 billion dollars to the terror victims, following its normalization of ties with Washington and the West.
Britain’s improving relations with Libya have come under close scrutiny after the early release of a former Libyan agent – Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi – convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing, in which 270 people were killed.
Megrahi — the only man convicted over the worst terrorist attack in British history — was released from a Scottish jail on August 20 on compassionate grounds and returned to Libya.
However, official reports say that the prisoner transfer agreement was part of a wider set of negotiations aimed at pushing forward lucrative oil deals with the African country and bringing a hostile Libya in from the cold.
—–Agencies