The British Government was promoting the sale of sniper rifles to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime weeks before the outbreak of the uprising against him.
Colonel Gaddafi Photo: REUTERS
Colin Freeman in Tripoli and Patrick Sawer
9:00PM BST 10 Sep 2011
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Documents found by The Sunday Telegraph show that in December last year, Britain’s ambassador in Tripoli was directly encouraging high-ranking figures within the Libyan army to visit Britain and view military equipment, including rifles and machine guns.
Richard Northern, Britain’s top diplomat in the Libyan capital, was joined by Maj Gen Jonathan Shaw, the Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff at the Ministry of Defence, for talks with the Libyan official in charge of buying weapons for Col Muammar Gaddafi’s army.
The same kind of guns were to be used weeks later by Gaddafi’s troops and security men to shoot demonstrators and residents in towns that joined the insurrection.
Hundreds of people were killed by marksmen, often firing sniper rifles and machine guns from rooftops in Benghazi, Misurata and other towns, as the revolution that began in February spread west to Tripoli. At least 30,000 people have been killed and 50,000 wounded during the civil war, according to estimates published last week by the country’s interim health ministry.
Today’s revelations, which demonstrate the extent of co-operation between British officials and their Libyan counterparts, will be seen as a fresh embarrassment for the Government in the wake of Gaddafi’s downfall.
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They also demonstrate how David Cameron’s Government at first continued co-operation on arms sales to Libya despite criticising its Labour predecessors for becoming too close to the regime.
Human rights campaigners last night said that it showed the perils of continuing to supply weapons to authoritarian regimes.
The latest disclosure follows allegations last week that MI6 co-operated in the "rendition" of Libyan dissidents back to their homeland, where they were imprisoned and tortured by Gaddafi’s security forces. They included Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the man now commanding rebel forces in Tripoli, who said he was taken to Libya in a CIA and MI6 operation in 2004 after being arrested in Bangkok.
In another case a Libyan Islamist and his family said they were imprisoned after being "rendered" in an operation hatched by MI6 in co-operation with Gaddafi’s intelligence services in March 2004.
This newspaper discovered the arms documents among the ruins of the British embassy in Tripoli, which was ransacked and set on fire by pro-Gaddafi crowds last May in retaliation for a Nato air strike that killed members of the Libyan leader’s family.
Files lay scattered across offices, filing cabinets had been wrenched open and the detritus of embassy life was scattered along floors and corridors. In one room of the building, abandoned when the Gaddafi regime expelled the ambassador and his staff, were files laying bare the close rapport between Gaddafi’s armed forces, the Government and British weapons manufacturers. The relationship had flourished after moves to bring Gaddafi in from the cold that resulted from his two high-profile meetings with Tony Blair in 2004 and 2007.
The documents included a copy of a covering note sent from the embassy to Maj Gen Abdulrahman Ali Al Sayd, the chief of military procurement and production of the Libyan Armed Forces (LAF). The note appears to follow discussions between the two British officials — Maj Gen Shaw and the ambassador — and Maj Gen Al Sayd.
Maj Gen Shaw commanded British forces in southern Iraq during the invasion of 2003. At the time of the correspondence he was in charge of international security policy at the MoD and is also understood to have been appointed to head the military’s cyber-warfare operations.
The correspondence followed the Libdex arms fair held at Mitiga International airport, in Tripoli, in November last year, which was attended by 50 British weapons manufacturers. This newspaper revealed last April that serving British soldiers were used as salesmen to encourage the Libyan government to buy British weapons. The covering note from the embassy introduces letters from two British arms manufacturers in response to a request by the LAF’s chief of procurement for further information about British sniper rifles.
The note, undated but written in late November or early December, states that both companies would be willing to host a visit to Britain by an LAF team.
It said: "With reference to the recent office call by the British Ambassador HE Richard Northern and the UK Ministry of defence, Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen Shaw, the British Embassy is pleased to respond on the points raised: Sniper 50 Calibre. Two qualified manufacturers, Accuracy International and Manroy Engineering, would be ready to host an inward visit to UK by an LAF team. This visit would be subject to the usual UK inwards protocol clearance and can be arranged through this embassy."
One of the two letters also in the file, dated Dec 1, 2010, from Glyn Bottomley, the managing director of Manroy Engineering, invited Maj Gen Al Sayd to visit the firm’s facilities in Beckley, East Sussex. It states: "Following the great success of the Libdex 2010 show we would like to invite yourself and relevant members of your staff to travel to the UK and visit Manroy Engineering so that we can demonstrate to yourself and your staff our products. This will include the full range of sniper weapons that were on show at the Libdex Show along with our other products that include our range of UK MOD machine guns."
A second letter, dated Nov 18, 2010, from Unionlet in Hayes, west London, invites the Libyan army tender committee to visit the Portsmouth factory of arms manufacturer Accuracy International.
It states: "This will give your team the opportunity of seeing the full manufacturing process as well as the ability to test the weapons systems that are of interest."
Unionlet describes itself as the sole distributor of Accuracy International products throughout the African continent.
The embassy note goes on to give information about other types of equipment that would be available to the Libyans from Britain, including chemical detection kits and protection masks, and ECM jammers, which disrupt the targeting systems of enemy ships.
The note states: "Reference is made to your requirement for programmable jammers. The UK authorities, with respect to its own national security requirements, is examining what could be released. Subject to confirmation, it would be possible to arrange a demonstration to the Libyan Jamahriya of equipment."
Neither visit had taken place when the uprising began.
But Manroy said that, had the political situation not changed so dramatically, it would have been confident of obtaining export licences to supply military equipment to Gaddafi.
The company defended its efforts to sell sniper rifles and machine guns to the regime. Ian Watts, Manroy’s director of operations, said: "It’s not embarrassing for us. The Libyans were a favoured regime with our government. Tony Blair was out there and they had become a country we could trade with. Our politicians were more than happy to allow us to export out there."
Mark Ranger, the managing director of Unionlet, said: "Its not my place to decide if a regime has a dubious record. That’s for the British Government to do."
He said he did not know why the British embassy in Tripoli had been involved in his attempt to strike a deal with the LAF, as he had sent his letter directly to Maj Gen Al Sayd.
Last February Britain blocked a £37 million sale of helicopters, armoured cars and machine guns brokered by Unionlet to the small African state of Swaziland, fearing the weapons could end up in Iran.
The latest revelations come two days before the opening of one of the world’s biggest arms fairs, at the ExCeL centre in London.
The last Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEi), which was held in 2009, hosted delegations from Algeria, Bahrain and Libya, countries that have seen government forces turn their weapons on civilians in recent months.
Barry Gardiner, Labour MP for Brent North and a former trade minister, said lessons had to be learnt from the affair.
He said: "There should be much stricter controls on precisely which regimes we are prepared to deal with. When there are instances of known repression of that country’s citizens in the past, then that is not a regime we should be selling arms to.
"It was right to bring Gaddafi back in and encourage him to give up his aspirations to have weapons of mass destruction, but to then try to sell him arms which could be used for internal repression is to have lost one’s moral compass."
A Foreign Office spokesman said: "The visit to Britain you refer to never took place and no sniper rifles were subsequently exported from the UK to the Gaddafi regime. Even if Gaddafi’s regime had wanted to purchase sniper rifles from the UK, it doesn’t necessarily follow that an export licence would have been issued. The Government operates one of the most rigorous arms export control regimes in the world. We do not export equipment where there is a clear risk it could be used for internal repression.
"When the Arab Spring began, all existing licences for the export of military and security equipment to the region were reviewed."
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