Germans deny deal to train Libyan forces after Jolo crisis

BERLIN (AFP) — German diplomats on Sunday denied a media report that Berlin agreed to help train Libyan security forces in a political pay-off for Tripoli's mediation in a hostage crisis in the Philippines in 2000.

"There was no such deal," diplomatic sources told AFP.

Bild am Sonntag became the second newspaper in two days to link former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder directly to a scandal over secret training allegedly provided by German officers to Libyan security forces.

It said Schroeder and Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi discussed the matter first during a secret meeting in Cairo on 2003 and again at an official summit the following year.

The paper said the deal was meant as a favour to Tripoli in return for its help in securing the release of three Germans who were among 21 western tourists kidnapped by extremists on the Philippine island of Jolo in 2000.

Libya's announcement in 2003 that it was abandoning any quest to acquire nuclear arms was designed to help the north African nation to shake off its pariah status. But Bild said at the time that it was still out of the question for Germany to openly help train Libyan forces.

Germany was shaken Friday by reports that members of the country's anti-terror police had earned extra cash by training Libyan security forces in their spare time.

The regional interior ministry in Duesseldorf subsequently revealed it had ordered police to investigate eight members of the Special Operations Squad (SEK) for suspected of having taken part in clandestine scheme. The officers concerned have been suspended from the elite unit.

A Berlin-based master sergeant in the German army and a former SEK officer, who was suspected of having planned to help train Libyans and contravened official secrecy codes, were also being investigated, the ministry added.

The Berliner Zeitung reported at the weekend that Germany's intelligence service had also been involved in training Libyans, under an accord allegedly signed by Schroeder.

According to the newspaper, the BND had requested not to have its own people directly involved and remained on the sidelines, but had provided know-how to German instructors as recently as last year.

The BND denied the report, saying it had "neither provided training assistance nor was it involved in an advisory or supportive capacity."

Schroeder could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile the news magazine Der Spiegel claimed the German embassy in Tripoli had discussed with the German special police squad details of the training they were providing.

The foreign ministry denied the report on Sunday.

"Investigations by the foreign ministry found that the embassy in Tripoli had in no way supported the activities that are a topic of discussion at the moment," ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said.

The daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung has reported that German officers were paid up to 15,000 euros (23,500 dollars) for training Libyan counterparts.

Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung has condemned the officers' behaviour, saying: "This should under no circumstances be accepted."

Schroeder was Germany's Social Democrat chancellor between 1998 and 2005.

European Company Close to Reaching Libyan Arms Deal

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

PARIS, Aug. 3 — European Aeronautic Defense and Space, Europe’s largest aerospace company, confirmed Friday that it was close to signing two weapons contracts with the government of Libya. It would be the first arms deal with the North African country since the European Union lifted military sanctions on it nearly three years ago.

The progress on contracts with the company, which is under French and German management, worth $405 million by some accounts, comes just a week after President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and his wife, Cécilia, helped secure the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who had spent more than eight years in prison after being accused of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with H.I.V.

The case had long strained Libya’s relations with the European Union. But the French government denied Friday that any direct bargain for weapons contracts had been made with Libya for the medical workers’ freedom.

The French defense minister, Hervé Morin, said on RTL radio that the deals had been cleared by a French ministerial commission on weapons sales in February, well before Mr. Sarkozy succeeded Jacques Chirac as president in May.

But undercutting French officials, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, disclosed the contracts in an interview in Le Monde. He said that during a recent visit by Mr. Sarkozy, the Libyans asked him to “accelerate things.”

Senators may block Libya envoy

Some U.S. senators are balking at sending an ambassador to Libya until it pays compensation to the families of terror victims. President Bush has nominated the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor to be the first U.S. envoy to Tripoli since the United States and Libya severed ties in 1980.

Bush this week tapped Gene Cretz, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv.

The United States and Libya re-established ties at a low level in 2004 after Libya agreed to end its weapons of mass destruction program and pay compensation to the families of the 270 victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

The four senators from New York and New Jersey – home states to many of the victims – said they would block the nomination until Libya had paid the $2.7 billion compensation stipulated in a 2006 agreement with the families.

"A promise made must be a promise kept," said U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.). "Libya has not made good on its promise to the victims of Pan Am Flight 103, and it must be held responsible."

Menendez and the other three senators – Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer of New York – are Democrats, and Lautenberg and Schumer are Jewish.

Cretz's appointment also comes as Libya has reaffirmed death sentences for six foreign nurses – one Palestinian and five Bulgarians – accused of poisoning children with the HIV virus as part of an Israeli plot.

Cretz, who has served posts in Syria and Egypt, has often been the top U.S. representative in Israel at Jewish memorial services, offering prayers in Hebrew. He spoke at the September 2005 funeral for Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal.

U.S. to send ambassador to Libya

Bush nominates diplomat Gene Cretz for post.
From the Associated Press

July 12, 2007

WASHINGTON — The United States took another step in restoring normal diplomatic relations with Libya on Wednesday when President Bush nominated a U.S. ambassador to the once-outcast nation.

The White House said that Gene Cretz, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, is Bush's pick for the post.

The nomination, which requires confirmation by the Senate, continues a process that began when Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi agreed to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction programs. The U.S. broke off diplomatic ties in 1981.

Libya was held responsible for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The attack claimed 270 lives, most American. Kadafi later agreed to pay $2.7 billion in reparations.

Bush's announcement came on the same day that Libya's Supreme Court upheld the death sentences of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted of infecting more than 400 children with the AIDS virus. The six, who have been in Libyan custody since 1999, have said they are innocent.

Libya Backs H.I.V. Case Death Penalty

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

The Libyan Supreme Court today once again upheld the death sentences imposed on five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were accused of intentionally infecting more than 400 Libyan children with the AIDS virus in 1998.

The court rejected the results of a 2003 investigation by two of the world’s leading AIDS experts, which found that unsanitary medical conditions at Benghazi Children’s Hospital were to blame for the children becoming infected with HIV. The nurses and doctor have now been in jail for nearly a decade.

Still, their fate remained uncertain today, despite the court’s ruling on the one hand, and months of recent negotiations to secure their release on the other. The European Union and the United States have repeatedly pressed the Libyan government to free the six, and groups of Nobel laureates have visited Tripoli to plead their case with the Libyan leader, Moammar Ghaddafi.

Another Libyan legal body, the Supreme Judicial Council, is scheduled to meet on Monday, and could overturn today’s court ruling or reduce the sentences for the six.

Reaction to the verdict in Europe today was was swift and dismayed.

“I deeply regret the verdict of the Supreme Court confirming the death sentence for the Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor,” said Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the union’s commissioner for external relations, who visited Libya in the spring.

“I firmly hope that clemency will be granted to the medical staff,” Ms. Ferrero-Waldner said. “This should be done in the same spirit of mutual respect and humanitarian compassion which characterized the European response to the plight of the Benghazi children and their families.”

Unusually, several senior officials of the union issued independent statements on the matter as well, including the commissioner for justice, Franco Frattini, who said his reaction was “utterly negative.”

In the past year, the European Union has given substantial financial aid to Libya in hopes of resolving the case. One high-level union diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the total amount was equivalent to more than 10 million euros ($14 million) for each infected child. The union has set up treatment programs in Libya for the children, built medical facilities and purchased equipment.

Bulgaria became a member of the European Union at the beginning of this year. Its entry into the union has raised the public profile of a case that had been simmering on the back burner for years.

Dr. Zdravko Georgiev, the husband of one of the jailed nurses, said in a telephone interview from Libya today that the families of the nurses were dismayed by the ruling. “After spending more than eight monstrous years in Libyan dungeons, we are exhausted to death,” he said. Dr. Georgiev was himself initially charged and jailed in the case; he was released after four years, but has not been allowed to leave Libya.

“We expected for the third time to hear the word ‘death,’ and despite that, it’s still a shock,” he said. “We don’t need a pardon, we need justice.”

In recent weeks, representatives of the Gadhafi Foundation, a charitable organization run by the Libyan leader’s son, have said repeatedly that a deal to free the five nurses and the doctor was imminent. Multiple calls to the foundation’s offices in Tripoli were not immediately returned or answered today.

Under Islamic law, the families of the children can accept compensation for the injury and express forgiveness, which would lead to the dismissal of the charges against the six. Libyan negotiators have long said that that would be the easiet way to resolve the matter, according to Bulgarian and European diplomats involved in the discussions.

But the Bulgarians have refused to consider suggestions that it offer to pay the families 10 million euros for each infected child, on the ground that making such payments would be tantamount to an admission of guilt, and that in any case the country could not afford that amount of money.

Dimiter Tzantchev, the foreign minister of Bulgaria, said in a statement today that the court’s decision was not a surprise, and that his country “is ready to react appropriately in the next days following the development of the situation.” He said there would be no further official comment today.

While the Gadhafi Foundation has said it was brokering an agreement with the children’s families to resolve the case, there have been continuing signals that the families would not easily be placated. “We are awaiting the execution of the death sentence,” the families’ lawyer, Al-Monseif Khalifa, said in Tripoli today, according to Reuters, which noted that members of 20 of the families demonstrated outside the court.

Analysts said that part of the problem was that Mr. Gadhafi is not popular in Benghazi, analysts said, and his government may not feel that it is in a position to reverse a death sentence that is widely viewed as just and proper there.

The convoluted case began more than a decade ago, in 1998, before Bulgaria was a member of the European Union and before Mr. Gadhafi renounced terrorism. At a time of economic upheaval and rapid inflation in Bulgaria, the five nurses, who were then in their late 30s and 40s, signed contracts to work at Benghazi Children’s Hospital for mundane reasons: to buy an apartment or to put a daughter through college. The Palestinain doctor had grown up in Libya.

The six were arrested in 1999. In the initial indictment, which reads like a spy novel, Libyan prosecutors claimed that the nurses intentionally infected the children as part of a plot by Mossad, the Israeli secret service, to undermine the Libyan state. Prosecutors claimed that the nurses confessed to the crime, and that investigators had found vials of tainted blood in one of the nurses’ rooms. For their part, the nurses said they were tortured and raped while in custody, in order to extract confessions from them.

In 2001, two of the world’s foremost AIDS experts, Dr. Luc Montagnier of France and Dr. Vittorio Colizzi of Italy, were invited by the Gadhafi Foundation to study the evidence and were granted wide access to the hospital. They concluded that poor sanitary practices — such as the transfusion of unsafe blood products — had led to the spread of the AIDS virus, and added that medical records indicated that some of the children had AIDS before the accused nurses arrived in Libya. Libyan authorities refused to provide the scientists with the vial of blood used in evidence.

Last year, more than 100 Nobel laureates signed a petition asking Libya to release the nurses and the doctor. The petition was delivered by hand to Moammar Gaddafi.

Reached by phone today, several member of the group said they had agreed not to discuss the case until later this week, or until there was a ruling from the Supreme Judicial Council.

Dr. Colizzi, who has visited the hospital in Benghazi several times over the last few years to help develop treatment programs there, said today, “I think all we can say for now it that this is incredible, really incredible.”

Chad rebels warn of return to war if Libya talks fail

Mon Jul 2, 2007 9:19AM EDT
By Nick Tattersall

DAKAR, July 2 (Reuters) - Chadian rebels fighting a hit-and-run guerrilla war against President Idriss Deby said on Monday failure to clinch a deal at peace talks in Tripoli would mean a return to all-out hostilities.

Libya brokered the talks to try to end an insurgency by a coalition of rebels fighting government forces in eastern Chad, a huge swathe of barren savannah also struggling to cope with a spillover of the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region.

Makaila Nguebla, a spokesman for the rebel Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD), said talks with a government delegation had been suspended while Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi attended an African Union summit in Ghana.

"We are waiting for Colonel Gaddafi to return because he is the sole mediator, he is the one who initiated these talks," Nguebla, who is based in Senegal's capital Dakar, told Reuters.

"We are waiting for him to put pressure on Idriss Deby either to accept our conditions or not to accept them. If he doesn't, then at least we will have shown the world that we were ready to work for peace," he said.

But Nguebla said the rebels were prepared to return to all-out war if the talks in Tripoli failed to end in agreement and criticised the international community for focusing on neighbouring Darfur but ignoring the crisis within Chad.

"We will not hesitate to make war. Our grievances have never been taken into consideration at an international level. At the African Union summit lots of questions are being discussed without any regard for the Chadian question," Nguebla said.

"We hold a territory, we hold arms, and nobody is prepared to stop and look at what is going wrong in eastern Chad."

It was not immediately possible to reach the Chadian government delegation.



DEBY'S SON FOUND DEAD

The rebels want Deby to agree to a national political dialogue that would lead to a transitional administration to steer the country towards early free elections. They also want the constitution amended to prevent presidents ruling for life.

A former French-trained helicopter pilot, Deby seized power in oil-producing Chad in 1990, leading rebels in a lightning offensive launched from across the border in Sudan.

He amended the constitution in 2005, removing a two-term limit for heads of state and an age limit of 70 for presidential candidates, clearing the way for his re-election last year in polls boycotted as unfair by opponents.

Deby's son Brahim, widely disliked but seen as his father's choice of successor, was found dead on Monday in the underground parking lot of a building he lived in near Paris, the latest blow to the strength of the ruling Zaghawa ethnic clan.

Deby's apparent grooming of Brahim had caused a split in the family, with elder members viewing him as unfit to govern. He was forced to sack Brahim as his adviser last June after he was arrested in Paris for possessing an illegal firearm and drugs.

Many Chadians believe it was Brahim's divisive presence that led to a spate of desertions by Deby's advisers, including two of his own nephews who abandoned him to join the rebel ranks.

"Brahim's death changes the morale of his father," Nguebla said. "The morale of the family is completely destabilised."

Deby's representatives could not be reached for comment. French investigators have not determined the cause of death.

. . . As Somalia's Islamists Helped by Outsiders

A confidential UN report states that Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Hezbollah helped the Somali Islamists who are gradually taking power away from the so-called "transitional" government in southern Somalia after capturing Mogadishu.