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The Libyan weapons trail: How Gaddafi armed the IRA.

by admin 23 July, 2021 1 Comment

By Deirdre Younge Kingsberry case The High Court in Belfast granted permission in early July for the family of a former member of the UDA, William Kingsberry – shot dead in 1991, to sue Libya for supplying the assault rifle used by the IRA unit that killed him. New approach The Kingsberry case, which is civil not criminal, is a new approach to gaining compensation for those killed or injured by Libyan-supplied matériel – and will be the first of many. The PSNI initially refused to confirm that Libyan-supplied Semtex was used in explosions after 1986; but a case brought by Belfast solicitors KRWLaw in Belfast on behalf of a number of victims has established the link to the AKM rifle used in the 1991 Kingsberry case. The Kingsberry case creates a precedent for many other victims. Many were killed or injured in bombs made with the powerful Czechoslovakian-manufactured but Libyan-supplied semtex explosive which was used in massive bomb and mortar attacks. The massive increase in lethal bombings fuelled with semtex created hundreds of victims killed or maimed after 1986. The first so-called ‘spectacular’ was the explosion at the Remembrance Day service in Enniskillen in November 1987 which left eleven dead and others with horrific injuries, causing shock and revulsion. According to Irish Government documents Gerry Adams believed it was an IRA own goal. It also came at a time when Adams was building up Sinn Féin, the political wing of the movement, and there were tentative moves towards talks. RUC woman Colleen McMurray was murdered in 1991 when a mortar boosted by semtex was fired at the police car in which she was travelling in Newry. The 1996 Docklands bombings in London were ignited by semtex. It was also used by so called ‘Dissidents’ to make the Banbridge bomb and the devastating Omagh bomb in 1998. Victims of all these atrocities are pushing for recognition and compensation. British Government reluctance So far, the British Government has refused to directly compensate victims of IRA Libyan-supplied weapons and semtex explosives out of the former overthrown leader General Muammaur Gaddafi’s funds, long frozen in British banks. It also refuses to publish a report it commissioned on the issue of compensation, from ex-journalist and member of the Charity Commission, William Shawcross. Action in Northern Ireland Actions in Northern Ireland are aimed at the British-Government-controlled funds in the UK. In 2011 Solicitor Jason McCue, who represents victims of the post-ceasefire Docklands bombings of 1996 and who acted for the Omagh Bomb relatives in their compensation case, obtained a letter from the Transitional Libyan Government. It’s not clear what weight the letter carries. The issue of compensating victims of the conflict in Northern Ireland has been mired in an argument about definitions. In the case of Libya it’s also entangled with the long and murky history of the various intelligence services’ involvement in Libya and the fractured politics post-Gaddafi. Libya Whether the post-Gaddafi state, weak and divided, should be expected to pay reparations may be moot but that is by no means the case with the interest now accruing to the British Government from Gaddafi funds in UK banks which could, in practice, be used to compensate victims. Sovereign Wealth Fund The new Libyan Prime Minister, Abdelhamid Dabaiba, has reportedly reached a deal with the Chairman of the country’s Sovereign Wealth Fund – the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) – Ali Mahmoud Hassan, whereby Dabaiba will receive €1 billion via the Central Bank of Libya for his cash-strapped Government. The deal shows the central importance in general terms of the Libyan fund and that the key is its control by Hassan, a former Gaddafi ally. Bahraini bank According to the French-based Africa Intelligence the LIA is sourcing the funds from CBL’s Bahraini subsidiary, ABC Bank. Most of the LIA’s assets abroad, amounting to billions of dollars, have been frozen since sanctions were imposed on Gaddafi. Gaddafi investments in UK and Ireland Gaddafi invested in everything from Pearson Inc to RBS to office blocks to villages he liked when he went on sovereign visits. It has been alleged there is €1.5billion in Irish banks. There is around £11 billion in frozen Gaddafi-era funds in banks in the UK from which the British Government receives substantial interest payments. It is from these assets in British Banks that lawyers will try to source the money for a compensation fund. The Libyan Government itself has been without a budget since March. Caught up in the internal politics of Libya and competing loyalties of politicians, some loyal to General Haftar the former Gaddafi-era exile and ‘warlord’ are making their support conditional on appointment of Haftar allies from the east of the country, to strategic positions. The Sovereign Fund is at the centre of allegations of the embezzlement of billions of dollars during the Gaddafi era. The Prime Minister himself has taken control of the Libyan Asset Recovery and Management Office [LARMO] in an effort to keep control of investigations into corruption in various state organisations. [Africa Intelligence, 02/07/2021] Hassan was in control of some of the organisations in question during the Gaddafi era and he is also the focus of scrutiny by the international community including the US State Department, for the lack of transparency in management of the Libyan Wealth Fund. It’s in this tangled atmosphere of competing interests and loyalties that the issue of compensation plays out. After Gaddafi The disastrous lack of preparation for the aftermath of the fall of the Gaddafi regime, by the UK and France in particular, left Libya divided in four between a powerless internationally recognised Government of National Accord; General Haftar – a returned exile from the US, who has shifting and tenuous control of the valuable oil fields; the so called Tobruk administration; and various militias both Islamic and other. Al Qaeda has a presence in the desert regions. Despite promises made by the Government of National Accord, the administration in Tripoli, it is questionable if the present Government could implement

Gross Neglect: MI5's fatal waste of resources

by Joseph de Búrca 29 June, 2017 0 Comments

I have spoken to Fred Holroyd from time to time. Holroyd worked with the British army and MI6 in Ireland, 1973-75, and has written a book about his experience ‘War without Honour’. Incredibly, British spies are still meddling with his post. Holroyd has furnished me with a photograph of an envelope he received from me. It contained an academic book about the origins of the Troubles, something that interests Holroyd. To protect the book from damage, it was placed inside a bubblewrap cover and then slipped inside an ordinary white envelope. Somewhere along the line someone pierced both layers of the package with what was undoubtedly a micro camera wand to see what dangers to the Realm lurked inside. The misuse of precious resources Moreover spendthrift paranoia like this and the decades-long Special Branch monitoring of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott compromises scarce resources. Since Theresa May became home secretary in 2010 total police numbers in england and wales have fallen by 46,700 or 19.5%. In contrast to this, the overall budget of the Single Intelligence account – which covers expenditure on MI5, MI6 and the government monitoring service GCHQ – rose to £2.63bn in 2015 up from £2.48bn in 2014; in 2010, it stood at £2bn. As a result of these cutbacks, armed troops had to be placed under the con- trol of the police after the Manchester suicide bomb atrocity. Meanwhile, MI5 is making excuses for its failure. One of these is that it is overwhelmed and under resourced. A fact shouted from the rooftops is that it requires 30 officers to place a single suspect under surveillance 24/7. Since there are approximately 3,000 such threats, it would require 90,000 surveillance officers to watch them all. Yet, despite this MI5 is still able to find resources to interfere with Holroyd’s post; photograph its content; compile reports and send them to whatever departments analyses them. After this MI5 probably liaises with MI6 which in turn contacts its spies in Dublin to find out more about the threat posed by the sinister forces who sent a history book from Dublin. Holroyd’s phone is probably also monitored. Since he is scrutinised daily, a fair estimation is that 10 working hours are consumed daily. Why? The surveillance of Holroyd intensified after the pressure to reinvestigate the Kincora Boys Home scandal grew to the point where the Hart Inquiry into child abuse in NI was established. Holroyd’s handwritten notes from his time in NI confirm that he had been told that Loyalist politicians were visiting Kincora for sexual purposes. If Holroyd’s post is being surveilled, other Kincora whistleblowers who have featured in recent editions of Village such as Brian Gemmell and Colin Wallace are probably being scrutinised too; not to mention Kincora survivors such as Richard Kerr and Clint Massey. If only 30 individuals are being monitored, that means about 300 man hours are being consumed daily. This is only part of MI5 and MI6’s misuse of time, energy and gold. They have both had to prepare for the Hart Inquiry and the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual abuse (IICSA) in London. Their only interest was to maintain the cover-up of their sordid role in a swathe of child sex abuse blackmail scandals. Officers would have had to talk to serving and retired officers to get a full picture of what went on; trawl through records; cull embarrassing documents; liaise with Home office and Foreign office officials and pull the wool over the eyes of senior politicians; engage with lawyers; consider PR and propaganda initiatives; and last but not least: coach their witnesses to lie to these inquiries. Tens of thousands of man hours must have been spent, and this will continue to be the case as the IICSA looks like it will last another decade. An avoidable massacre There is no doubt that the Manchester massacre could have been avoided. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, has stated that the bomber was “known” to the security services “up to a point”. His mother told them that he had been radicalised. Two of his friends called the police hotline in 2012 and warned that he believed that “being a suicide bomber was okay” and that he was “supporting terrorism”. He also made trips to Libya and, it now appears, Syria. In addition to wasting time on Holroyd et al, MI5 has a lamentable record of eavesdropping on trade unionists and other civil rights groups. one of those placed under the microscope was that well-known threat to the realm, Jeremy Corbyn. It’s anyone’s guess how much of this nonsense is still going on at the expense of British taxpayers while Isis terrorists gambol back-and-forth from the Middle east. The present Director-General of MI5 is Andrew Parker. He believes that MI5 is an honourable organisation. We will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that all the recent child-abuse skulduggery has taken place behind his back. Will someone now please tell him that he should redeploy his troops from Holroyd et al to Isis terrorists. The politics of the pirouette The demons unleashed by Britain’s destruction of Libya loom large in the story of the Manchester bomber. He had a Libyan background and was trained by Isis in Libya and/or Syria. Going back a few years, MI6 (which is responsible for overseas intelligence activity) failed to predict what was likely to happen in Libya when David Cameron was considering bombing Colonel Gadaffi’s forces in support of the rebels. It certainly didn’t impress this likelihood on him with sufficient force to prevent the bombing of Libya by the RAF. Chaos and civil war engulfed the country and created a haven for Isis. Overall, recent British-Libyan history defies belief. Gaddafi furnished the IRA with arms, his agents had planted a bomb on an airliner which exploded over Lockerbie and shot a police officer dead outside the Libyan embassy in London. On the other side of the fence, the US and UK plot against Gaddafi and on one

World War 1 and the Middle-East

by Anthony Coughlan 17 July, 2015 0 Comments

If Colonel Gadaffi were still running Libya there would not be mass migration across the Mediterranean, with thousands drowned because of unscrupulous traffickers. Gadaffi was guilty of the sin of all those secular dictators. He was too independent of ‘the West’. Britain and France, backed by America, bombed him out of existence. Their excuse was that he intended assaulting civilians in a provincial town. They got the cover of a UN Security Council resolution, which a weak Russia failed to veto. Now Libya is a failed state racked by civil war. Where do these Mediterranean migrants come from? Many are from Syria, another state afflicted by civil war encouraged by the West. Since 2011 the Syrian rebels against the Assad regime have been covertly financed and armed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, with the CIA and Israeli intelligence overseeing the details. Recall the House of Commons vote which denied Tory Premier David Cameron permission to bomb Syria by 285 votes to 272 in 2013. Encouraged by the US, Cameron and France’s Hollande wanted to repeat in Syria the regime- change they had brought about in Libya two years before. It was surely Ed Miliband’s finest moment as Labour leader that he refused to go along. 30 Tories and nine Lib Dems voted against Cameron too. This House of Commons No in turn gave the US Congress the impetus to stop Obama’s impending assault on Assad. In Syria the pretext was to be that Assad used chemical weapons against his foreign-financed rebels. If these rebels succeed in overthrowing the Assad regime, the country’s Christians, Alawites and many Shia Muslims are likely to have their throats cut. The paradox now is that support for the Assad regime in Syria and its Shia-backed counterpart in Iraq looks like being the best hope of holding back the ISIS monster which these ‘rebel’ groups with their dubious sources of arms and finance have spawned. America needs Iran and its clients as allies, not opponents, in the region. Najibiullah in Afghanistan, at the time of the Russian intervention there, was the first of the secular dictators America sought to overthrow by backing the mujahideen fundamentalists against him. Osama Bin Laden was on the US payroll then. Najibullah was executed by the Taliban in 1996. Saddam Hussein was the second, overthrown by Bush and Blair in their 2003 invasion of Iraq. When Saddam ruled Iraq, Sunni, Shia and Christians lived peaceably side by side. Now Iraq too is well on the way to being a failed state, racked by the Shia-Sunni conflict which America encouraged until the tormented politics of the region spawned ISIS. Najibullah, Saddam Hussein, Gadaffi and Assad were certainly dictators but the West did not realise that worse could follow. Since Bush invaded Iraq the USA has become self-sufficient in oil because of the fracking revolution. America no longer needs Saudi oil as it once did. This is the basis of Obama’s turn towards Iran, which in turn causes consternation among the Saudis and Israelis. The Saudi-Israeli response is to try to up Sunni-Shia antagonism further, building on what the Americans had started, seeking thereby to undermine Iran’s clients in the Iraqi and Syrian governments and in the Lebanese Hezbollah, in the hope of stymying a US-Iran deal. A seminal book on the historical background to the region’s current anguished politics, is James Barr’s ‘A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that shaped the Middle East’. The catastrophe in the Middle East is rooted in Western power-grabbing for the provinces of the Ottoman Empire a century ago in World War 1. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan were all Ottoman provinces then. The different religious communities had lived peaceably side by side in them for centuries. Getting hold of them was one of the war aims of imperial Britain and imperial France in 1914. It was why Britain and France pushed Turkey into an alliance with Germany in the first months of the Great War. What was presented to British and French public opinion as a war to defend the rights of small nations and to prevent ‘poor little Belgium’ from falling under German rule, was seen by these countries’ Governments as an opportunity to expand their empires in the Middle East at the expense of the Turks. Britain particularly wanted to gain control of Palestine and with it the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal, that vital route to Britain’s empire in India. The Bolsheviks published the secret treaties between the Entente Powers within a month of the 1917 Revolution, while simultaneously repudiating them and announcing Russia’s withdrawal from the War. The British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted. The most important secret treaty was the agreement in March 1915, just one month before the Gallipoli operation, promising Russia control of Constantinople and the Dardanelles after the war, in return for Russian agreement to support British interests in Persia, next to India. Britain had fought the Crimean War in 1854 to prevent Russia taking Constantinople and establishing itself on the Mediterranean. For the same reason Disraeli risked war with Russia in 1878 and sent the British Mediterranean fleet through the Dardanelles at the time. In the lead-up to World War 1, however, a century of British rivalry with Russia – the “Great Game” that was given literary form in Kipling’s novel ‘Kim’ – was abandoned in order to induce Russia to join France in encircling Germany. Russia and France together were the only European land powers that could crush Britain’s rising commercial rival, Germany. As a seapower Britain could help in that defeat, but only land power and large armies could ensure a decisive victory. In early 1915, with stalemate on the Western Front based on static trench warfare from the Channel to the Swiss border, the British and French Governments were worried that Russia might pull out of the war altogether in view of the pasting its armies were taking at the time from