Moussa Koussa, Libya’s Foreign Minister in exile, has been named in court documents as the man who oversaw Libya’s supply of the Semtex bomb material and weapons to the IRA.
The allegations come as Northern Ireland reels from yesterday’s fatal car bombing in Co. Omagh.
The US court documents allege Mr Koussa and five other Libyans “knowingly and wilfully” conspired to commit “the deliberate and wrongful death” of eight victims who died in separate bombings in Docklands, Bishopsgate and the Baltic Exchange in London, and the Cheshire town of Warrington, in separate incidents in the 1990s.
Jonathan Ganesh, a man injured in the 1996 Docklands blast, said he and other survivors would meet lawyers this week to discuss applying for a warrant under international law to arrest Mr Koussa, with the basis of the claim being Mr Koussa’s alleged responsibility for overseeing the shipment of Semtex on four ships that ended up in the hands of the IRA in the 1980s, according to The Sunday Times.
The court documents, originally filed in a Washington DC court in 2008, reportedly cite the skipper of one of the ships telling French police that Nasser Ali Ashour, a key lieutenant of Mr Koussa, personally oversaw the loading of the Eksund in Tripoli in October 1987.
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The Eksund was loaded with two tonnes of Semtex, 50 SAM-7 rocket-launchers and 1,000 AK-47s, and was later intercepted by French police.
Mr Koussa, who fled Libya last week, is also implicated in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, with Scottish detectives and prosecutors set to meet with Foreign Office officials tomorrow to discuss Mr Koussa as part of the investigation into the attack.
The Crown Office, which oversees prosecutions in Scotland, has requested an interview with Mr Koussa over the bombing, which claimed 270 lives.
Before becoming Libya’s Foreign Minister in 2009, Mr Koussa had been head of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s feared intelligence agency since 1994, and was a senior intelligence agent at the time of the Lockerbie bombing. Mr Koussa is also believed to have played a key role in securing the release of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the only man convicted over the incident.
Alex Salmond, Scottish First Minister, said there was “every reason” to believe that Mr Koussa could “shed light on the Lockerbie atrocity and the circumstances that led up to it”.
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Mr Koussa is currently being guarded by MI6 in a safe house in the south of England, where he is believed to be being treated with courtesy, although the Secret Intelligence Service is also sensitive to suggestions that it could be accused of harbouring an alleged murderer.
Mr Ganesh said the Docklands victims’ group had been assured by the Foreign Office that Mr Koussa would not be exempt from prosecution.
“We’ve been trying to get justice for years; this is our golden opportunity to get that justice,” Mr Ganesh told The Sunday Times.
The bombings claimed victims as young as three, and injured scores of people. Dominic Raab, a Tory MP and former Foreign Office lawyer, said if there was any evidence that Mr Koussa had been personally responsible for any terrorist offences, whether in relation to Lockerbie or the IRA bombings, “he must be arrested and prosecuted in the British courts”.
David Cameron told MPs last week that Mr Koussa had not been offered immunity from prosecution. Mr Cameron has also urged police to follow the trail of evidence over the Lockerbie bombing wherever it leads.
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The papers filed in Washington also implicate Mr Koussa in the deaths of people murdered in earlier attacks in Northern Ireland. In the papers, Mr Koussa is alleged to have “specifically approved” the murder of Mohamed Ramadan, a BBC journalist, outside the Regent’s Park mosque in London in 1980.
MI6 is believed to have has given Mr Koussa the use of a telephone and persuaded him to call up to 15 key figures in Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Tripoli, with the hope he will persuade them to desert the embattled Libyan leader.
Government officials said the issue of whether Mr Koussa would face justice for the alleged offences would be addressed once he had completed his role in trying to “turn” key members of Colonel Gadaffi’s regime.
One official said the priority was to use him to try to save lives and the judicial issue would be considered later, but added: “We have absolutely no illusions as to the possible blood on this guy’s hands.”