MI5 files reveal that the embassy run by Moussa Koussa, the Libyan defector, was involved in directing assassinations against Libyan dissidents in Britain.
By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent 6:07PM BST 05 Apr 2011
The files show that the security service believed they had “conclusive evidence” that the Libyan embassy, where Mr Koussa was the ambassador, was “directing operational and intelligence gathering activities against Libyan dissidents.”
Moussa Koussa outside the Libyan People's Bureau which he headed in St James's Square, London in June 1980
The intelligence, related in Defence of the Realm, the official history of MI5, also says that Mr Koussa was reprimanded by Tripoli for failing to stop a dissident protest and was told that at least one of the demonstrators would have to be killed.
He subsequently told a newspaper reporter that the Gaddafi regime had decided to kill two dissidents in Britain, adding: "I approve of this."
Mr Koussa is thought to be helping MI6 understand the inner workings of the regime of Col Muammar Gaddafi including the Libyan leader’s sources of finance and the make-up of his armed forces.
He is also thought to be trying to persuade other members of the regime to join him in exile.
Related Articles
Profile: Moussa Koussa, high-profile Lockerbie spymaster
31 Mar 2011
Although he has not been given immunity against prosecution after his arrival in Britain last week, William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, said the government would discuss the merits of removing travel and financial sanctions against him.
Noman Bentoman, a Libyan exile who was once the subject of an extradition request from Mr Koussa, said the former minister had been instrumental in turning Libya against terrorism in the 1990s and could be a key witness against Col Gaddafi.
Mr Benotman, who now works for the counter-radicalisation think-tank Quilliam, added: “He is a key statesman who was close to the regime and could give vital evidence against Gaddafi.”
However the Libyan Interim Transitional Council, said they would not want Mr Koussa to come over to the rebels because he had “too much blood on his hands.”
Guma el-Gamaty, a British-based spokesman for the council, said: “He has plotted and planned and supervised the killing of political opponents inside and outside Libya. Many Libyans want to see him on trial and they have that right.”
One dissident, who asked not to be named because he still has family in Libya, told the Daily Telegraph his mother had received a telephone call from Mr Koussa before he was expelled from Britain to tell her “Your husband will not be coming home tonight.”
“I believe he was supposed to be one of those two people,” the dissident said. “Everybody in Libya knows his name and it still sends a chill down their necks.”
Despite Mr Koussa’s more recent history of working with the West, a number of those affected by the IRA and Libyan attacks want him to answer for his past support for terrorism.
He is due to be questioned by Scottish police later this week in relation to the Lockerbie bombing.
The MI5 history also relates that by the late 1980s Libya had shipped about 150 tons of weapons, including several tons of Semtex, to the IRA and one document said: “PIRA (Provisional IRA) has acquired from Libya more weapons etc than it can use.”
A US State Department report, Patterns of Global terrorism, cited Mr Koussa’s involvement with the Libyan Anti-Imperialism Centre, known as Mathaba, which, it said was used to “support terrorist networks and...plays an important role in Gaddafi’s terrorism strategy.”
It added: “With representatives in many Libyan embassies worldwide, the AIC runs its own independent clandestine operations and disburses payments to terrorist, insurgent and subversive groups.”
However the organisation mainly concentrated on Africa and South America and supporters of Mr Koussa have suggested that he had no involvement in IRA gun running.
Nevertheless opponents say that Mr Koussa spent decades at the top of the intelligence apparatus of Col Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya and must have known about events such as the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie which killed 270 people and the destruction of a French airliner over Niger in 1989.
Mr Koussa was named along with three other officials involved with the Libyan intelligence service in a US law suit filed in connection with supplying Semtex to the IRA for bombings in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain.
The legal documents also allege that Mr Koussa asked one intelligence operative to recruit a Libyan nuclear scientist living in London.
They go on to cite Mr Koussa’s alleged involvement in orchestrating a “brutal wave of assassinations directed at Libyan dissidents in Europe” particularly the killing of a journalist with the BBC World Service, Mohamed Mustafa Ramadan, outside Regent’s Park Mosque in London and a Libyan lawyer called Mahmud Abu Salem Nafa in Kensington, West London in 1980.
Jonathan Ganesh, who was injured in the Docklands bombing of 1996, told the Daily Telegraph: “There is no doubt in my mind whatever that Moussa Koussa is a very dangerous man with a checkered past, to say the least.
“He attacked a democracy which is now giving him sanctuary and he has fled to save his own neck.”
No comments:
Post a Comment