UK official says oil was part of Lockerbie talks

LONDON — Trade and oil considerations played a major role in the decision to include the Lockerbie bomber in a prisoner transfer agreement between Britain and Libya, a senior British official said in an interview published Saturday.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw said trade, particularly a deal for oil company BP PLC, was “a very big part” of the 2007 negotiations that led to the prisoner deal. The agreement was part of a wider warming of relations between London and Tripoli.

“Libya was a rogue state,” Straw was quoted as saying by The Daily Telegraph newspaper. “We wanted to bring it back into the fold and trade is an essential part of it – and subsequently there was the BP deal.”

The British government has faced intense criticism over the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a Libyan convicted in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland. The attack killed 259 people aboard the plane, most of them American, and 11 on the ground.

Last month Scottish officials freed al-Megrahi, 57, on compassionate grounds because he is dying of prostate cancer.

AP