Community | September 01, 2009 | 3 comments

Details of Blair-Gaddafi Lockerbie PTA meetings will remain secret

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bansheewail
Downing Street has confirmed that papers relating to Tony Blair's meeting with the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, will not be among the documents about the Lockerbie bomber being released this afternoon.

The prime minister's spokesman said the government would publish all "relevant" correspondence relating to the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, this afternoon.

The Foreign Office and the Ministry of Justice are putting documents on their website after 2pm. In Edinburgh the Scottish government will also be releasing its own documents, probably later in the afternoon.

But the papers will not cover Blair's meetings with Gaddafi in 2004 and 2007, which paved the way for a prisoner transfer agreement between the two countries, Downing Street said today.

Today David Cameron claimed that Gordon Brown's failure to say whether or not he approved of the release of Megrahi shows that he does not have the leadership skills required of a prime minister.Writing in the Times, the Conservative leader says that having the willingness to express an opinion is "a basic requirement of leadership".

The Tories have condemned the Scottish government's decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds. Brown has said that he was "repulsed" by the way Megrahi received a hero's welcome when he returned to Tripoli, but the prime minister has not said whether or not he approved of the decision to grant Megrahi his liberty.

In his Times article, Cameron says: "Mr Brown should have condemned the decision to release al-Megrahi. At the very least, he should have expressed an opinion. But all we got, day after day, was a wall of silence, finally broken after a long week when Mr Brown declared that he was 'angry' and 'repulsed' at scenes in Tripoli. We all were. But that wasn't the point. People wanted to know what the prime minister thought about the decision to release him in the first place.

"Such candour is a basic requirement of leadership – a quality that once again Mr Brown has demonstrated he lacks."
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3 comments // Details of Blair-Gaddafi Lockerbie PTA meetings will remain secret

  • Wetdog
  • Bren589
  • bansheewail
    • 0
      bansheewail  
    • I wonder what the Bush Adminstration knew about this deal?? Blair and Bush were like a "couple" for a while. Putting access to Lybian oil exploration before the safety and security of free men and women everywhere is treason of the highest order. Meanwhile, anyone who opposed Bush's or Blair's policies during that time were labeled as "siding with the terrorists". The hypocrisy is staggering!

    • 2 years ago
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