Negotiators ruled out ‘Libyan-IRA terrorism compensation’

Negotiators for the British government ruled out the possibility of compensation for victims of IRA terrorism, where explosives were provided by Libya.

The former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw revealed the information when appearing before Parliament on Wednesday afternoon.

Mr Straw said that the Libyan government would have insisted that they were not directly responsible for how the Semtex was used.

Libya accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie plane bombing in and the murder of police officer Yvonne Fletcher outside the British Embassy in the north African country in 1984.

"If you went to a British court on this issue and sought to argue liability for those two sets of matters and liability in respect of PIRA terrorism, you would have greater difficulty if the Libyans were to resist, as I suspect they would, in showing that there was a clear chain of causation between the supply of terrorism and the actual injuries and deaths which resulted.

"That was the difficulty, that was what the Libyans were resisting, and that is why a judgment had been made, an overall judgment had been made that we were not going to get very far pursuing that."

Mr Straw was speaking to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee at Westminster, and gave details from his time as Foreign Secretary between 2001 and 2006 and in 2003, helped to secure a deal that saw Muammar Gaddafi give up his weapons of mass destruction programmes.

"Although they admitted they had supplied the Semtex, there was no parallel acceptance of responsibility, and still less an acceptance by them of the case for compensation for those victims,” he said.

“That was their responsibility.”

However, Labour backbencher Kate Hoey attacked Mr Straw's position and said he was dismissing up to 3,500 deaths.

"This issue was never swept aside," he repiled."Mr Blair devoted the 10 years that he was prime minister to securing peace in Northern Ireland."