Gadaffi ‘financing U.K. Leftists’

Press, 14 September 1981, Page 8

Gadaffi ‘financing U.K. Leftists’

NZPA London The Libyan leader. Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, has sent thousands of dollars to extreme Left-wing groups in Britain to finance their support for his regime, a London newspaper said yesterday. Quoting unidentified “reliable sources” in London and Tripoli, the “Sunday Telegraph" said that a large bulk of the funds has gone to the Workers' Revolutionary Party, a small ultra-Left political group whose members include the actress, Vanessa Redgrave, and her actor brother, Corin. Some of the money is believed to have paid for printing machinery for the party’s daily newspaper, “News Line,” which regularly publishes favourable articles about the Libyan strongman, and for- production of the “Green March,” the English translation of a weekly Libyan government

paper, published by the London office of the Libyan News Agency. Both publications are printed by the same company in north-west England. Libyan exiles in London were quoted by the “Sunday Telegraph” as saying substantial sums of money had gone regularly to help British sympathisers of the Libyan regime. The payments apparently coincide with what the paper describes in a separate article as improving relations between Libya and Britain, which reached an all-time low last year when two Libyans were murdered in London and Musa Kusa, the head of the Libyan People’s Bureau (the name Libya gives its embassy), was ordered out of the country. The British Embassy in Tripoli, reduced to a handful of diplomats after the Lon-

don incidents, is gradually being restored to its former strength and Libyan industry officials are coming to Britain for trade talks next month, the paper said. At the other end of the political spectrum, Rightwing "riot groups” have infiltrated the British Army to get “training for anarchy on our streets,” the popular “News of the World" has said. The Sunday paper said: "an inquiry has been launched into the political aims of soldiers in the 131st independent commando unit of the Territorial Army volunteer reserve based in Stanmore” (in London’s suburbs). “Detectives of the Army’s special investigation branch are probing reports that soldiers on leave have held military-style exercises with members of the (Right-wing) British Movement and the new National Front.”