PARIS, 25 August 2003 — A group representing families of those killed in a 1989 bombing of a French airliner returned to Paris from Tripoli yesterday without a deal from Libya to pay compensation similar to the $2.7 billion it has paid out for victims of the 1988 Lockerbie attack.
“There is no concrete result,” Guillaume Denoix de Saint Marc, a spokesman for relatives of the 170 people who died on the UTA flight over Niger, told AFP. His group had gone to Tripoli Thursday on an aircraft provided by the French government to negotiate with officials from the Qaddafi Foundation, run by Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s son Seif Al-Islam.
France has threatened to block a lifting of UN sanctions on Libya unless the country offers compensation to the victims of the UTA flight equivalent to the $2.7 billion it has paid out for families of the Lockerbie bombing.
A UN Security Council vote on a resolution put foward by Britain was delayed pending the outcome of the Tripoli talks. Denoix de Saint Marc said his group would issue a statement later giving further details of the discussion.
Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who provided the aircraft for the French group, has repeated that he wants to see Lockerbie-sized payments to the families of all the victims on the UTA flight before sanctions are lifted.
His spokespeople have said that a 30-million-euro ($33 million) payment by Libya to a third of the UTA families in 1989 as a “definitive resolution” of the bombing was insufficient in the light of the Lockerbie deal, and it was now seeking a much higher “complementary settlement”.
Libya initially termed the French demand “blackmail”, but last Friday its ambassador to London, Mohammed Al-Zouai, said an improved compensation offer to the UTA families might be made, suggesting that a compromise might be arrived at. The US State Department has said Libya has now transferred the entire $2.7 billion agreed under the Lockerbie deal to a Swiss escrow account, opening the way for a UN vote to lift sanctions that would trigger the payment of a first installment of the compensation to families.
Washington has lashed Paris for trying to get a better deal on the UTA compensation than the one it extracted for the Lockerbie case, prompting de Villepin’s office to emphasize that additional payment was being sought for the families of all the people killed on UTA flight, regardless of the nationality.
The French aircraft was carrying 54 French, 48 Congolese, 25 Chadians, 10 Italians, eight Americans, five Cameroonians, four Britons, three Canadians, three people from the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), two Central Africans, two Malians, two Swiss passengers, one Algerian, one Greek, one Moroccan and one Senegalese.
But a group representing the families of the 88 Africans on the flight on Saturday accused the French government of trying to get a preferential deal for its own citizens.
Abderaman Koulamallah, a spokesman for the group, which did not take part in the Tripoli talks, told Radio France Internationale: “The African families will never accept a cut-price deal. If people think they can throw us crumbs to keep us happy, they better think again. We will never, never accept that.”
