Lockerbie and Libyan oil

TRIPOLI, Libya, Aug. 28 (UPI) -- Scotland's controversial Aug. 20 release of a cancer-stricken Libyan intelligence agent convicted of bombing Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988 has triggered allegations that Britain was seeking to secure oil and gas contracts in energy-rich Libya.

London vehemently denies that. But France, Italy and Switzerland have done just that as Europe strives to cut its dependency on natural gas supplies from an increasingly assertive Russia.

And the United States would like nothing better than to gets its oil companies back into Libya, where they ruled the roost until an upstart army officer from the desert, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, overthrew the pro-Western Senussi monarchy 42 years ago next month.

These actions underline the policy conducted by most oil-importing Western governments that have set aside their human-rights agendas to secure big-ticket contracts, particularly in the energy sector, with regimes that are widely considered to be unsavory.

Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz flew to Tripoli in early August to apologize for the July 2008 arrest in Switzerland of one of Gadhafi's sons, Hannibal, and his pregnant wife on charges of abusing their servants.

Merz's mission was to restore the supply of Libyan oil exports to Switzerland -- totaling 20 percent of Swiss consumption -- that Gadhafi cut off after the July incident in Geneva.

The Libyan agent, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 for the midair bombing of the Pan Am jumbo jet, in which 270 people died, by a Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands.

Megrahi, the biggest mass murderer in British legal history, was imprisoned in Scotland, where the wreckage of the U.S. airliner crashed into the market town of Lockerbie.

But he was released by authorities in Scotland, which has its own legal system, on "compassionate grounds" after he was found to have terminal cancer.

Megrahi had served eight years of his sentence and was given a hero's welcome by Gadhafi in Tripoli.

The British government says it wasn't involved in the affair. But Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam, widely seen as the Libyan leader's political heir, asserts that London played a central role in Megrahi's release, despite U.S. efforts to block it.

The younger Gadhafi publicly thanked "our friends in the U.K. government who had an important role to play in this happy ending."

He told Libyan television that Megrahi's release was linked to trade deals. "In all commercial contracts, for oil and gas, with Britain," he said, Megrahi's case "was always on the negotiating table."

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown reportedly discussed the case with Gadhafi during a Group of Eight summit in Italy in July six weeks before Megrahi was freed. The BBC reports that British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson met the younger Gadhafi six weeks ago in Greece where both were vacationing.

Indeed, British officials had made no secret of intense lobbying by London, one of Gadhafi's most implacable foes in the 1970s and '80s, for a prisoner transfer treaty with Tripoli that was signed in April.

That was before Megrahi was diagnosed with prostate cancer, so he could be sent home, opening the way for trade deals both sides wanted. His illness simply accelerated the process.

Libya, rehabilitated after years as an international pariah since Gadhafi abandoned a clandestine nuclear arms program in 2003, sits on vast reserves of oil and natural gas.

British energy giant BP estimated in 2008 that the North African state has proven reserves of around 41.5 billion barrels and 1.49 trillion cubic meters of gas, which constitute the 10th-largest oil and gas reserves on the planet.

BP is one of several international energy companies scrambling to win contracts from Tripoli to explore 21,000 square miles of the Sahara for untapped oil and gas. Its chances presumably have now improved.

Western Europe, concerned at Russia's recent cutoffs of gas supplies, has been seeking alternative sources of supply that would free it from Moscow's machinations. North Africa is where they're looking.

A planned 2,500-mile Trans-Sahara Gas Pipeline running from Nigeria through Algeria, and then to Europe via undersea pipelines to Spain and Italy, is widely seen as a critical source of supply. It is to be operational by 2015.

In 1998 Italian companies concluded major oil and gas deals with Libya, a former Italian colony, after Rome publicly apologized for human-rights violations before World War II. Ten years later they signed a friendship treaty that embraced infrastructure deals worth $5 billion.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy secured a multibillion-dollar deal for French combat aircraft in 2007 after he got Gadhafi off an embarrassing hook by negotiating the release of Bulgarian medics held for allegedly infecting patients with the HIV virus.