Scots police to meet Foreign Office over Libyan defector

Published on Saturday 2 April 2011 18:43

FOREIGN Office officials will meet Scottish police and Crown officials tomorrow to discuss questioning Moussa Koussa about the Lockerbie bombing.

The Crown Office and Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary have said they want to speak to the defector about the UK's worst ever terrorist atrocity. Last night statements released by the Foreign and Crown offices confirmed that a meeting will take place to discuss the situation.

News of the meeting came as the FBI agent in charge of the Lockerbie case called for Koussa to be questioned by a joint US/Scottish investigation team about the terrorist atrocity.

Richard Marquise, the special agent who led the US-arm of the original inquiry, said that Koussa was known to the original investigators but they had been prevented from interviewing him by the diplomatic restrictions of the time.

Marquise said his FBI team had been "aware of" Koussa, adding that he should now be interrogated in an attempt to secure further convictions for the Lockerbie bombing. The only conviction so far has been of Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbaset al Megrahi, who was released from prison in 2009 on compassionate grounds.

Although the investigating team was unable to uncover any direct links between Koussa, currently being debriefed by MI6, and the UK's worst mass murder, they knew his name had come up in connection with other crimes.

Speaking to Scotland on Sunday, Marquise said the defector was "very close" to Muammar Gaddafi and, as the head of Libya's "Anti-Imperialist Committee", he had been linked to funding guerrilla warfare in Africa, the IRA and the destruction of a French airliner over Niger the year after Lockerbie. The airliner, UTA flight 772, was blown up in September 1989 with the loss of 171 lives.

"We were aware of him and we were aware of his background. We were aware of his connection with the anti-imperialist committee, which funded and directed operations in the Third World countries," Marquise said.

He added: "I would hope there would be joint US and Scottish team to look at this. The FBI worked very closely with the police in Scotland. The US and Scotland could sit down and find out what he knows and see if any other people could be charged on the case."