Two Libyans released after Heathrow blast

Press, 23 April 1984, Page 1

Two Libyans released after Heathrow blast

NZPA-Reuter London Police investigating a bombing which injured 22 people at London’s Heathrow Airport on Saturday released two men, believed to be Libyan students, who were arrested soon after the blast, police sources said. The two men were detained at the airport soon after the bomb ripped through a baggage hall on Saturday, the sources said.

Scotland Yard said the attack had “definite similarities” to a spate of bombings last month which the police blamed on the regime of the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi.

The possibility of Libyan involvement injected new tension into the delicate

bargaining going on between Britain and Libya over the police siege of the Libyan Embassy in London. The British police have been staking out the embassy since Tuesday when shots, apparently fired from the building, killed a policewoman and injured 10 antiGadaffi demonstrators.

Libya warned Britain at the time that the Libyan people “know how to avenge themselves.” The British Government was anxious to play down speculation over the bombing, emphasising in a statement from the Home Secretary, Mr Brittan, “We do not know who was responsible for last night’s bomb.”

The bomb exploded in Heathrow’s terminal 2 in an unclaimed piece of luggage

which the police said had arrived on an incoming flight.

One of the 80 flights into the terminal on Saturday was a Libyan Arab Airlines aircraft. Porters said six bags from that flight were not claimed.

Airport staff said the bomb could have caused a big air disaster.

Commander Bill Hucklesby, chief of London’s anti-terrorist squad, told reporters he believed the bomb had a timing device. “It is a professional bomb and we suspect it is from the Middle East,” he said. “This bomb is similar to the bombs we found on March 10.”

Seven bombs which exploded in London and the northern city of Manchester on March 10 and 11 were believed by the police to have been aimed at exiled opponents of Gadaffi’s regime. Those bombs injured more than 20 people. Four Libyans have been charged with the London and Manchester bomb attacks.

One Conservative Parliamentarian demanded action against Libya if it was shown to have planted the Heathrow bomb.

Mr Terry Dicks said that the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, should follow President Reagan’s example if Libya was to blame — break off diplomatic relations and expel all its diplomats. Five victims of the bombing are still in hospital. The most seriously injured, an Air France employee, Mr John Blundell, aged 35, was described as “stable” with burns and shrapnel wounds. Armed uniformed police are patrolling all three terminals at the airport. The fatal shooting of a British policewoman in London on Tuesday which led to the siege of the Libyan mission in London was carried out on the order of the Gadaffi Government, a newspaper has claimed. The “Sunday Telegraph” made the claim in a frontpage story yesterday. The newspaper said intercepted messages between London and Tripoli showed that the shooting of Constable Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan mission in St James’s Square was carried out on the direct orders of Colonel Gadaffi’s government.

The “Sunday Telegraph” said it had learned that the orders to the Libyan People’s Bureau in London were:

• To open fire on any anti-Gadaffi demonstrators who gathered outside the building.

• To shoot at the accompanying police officers. © To follow up with an 1.R.A.-style campaign of bombing.

The orders were intercepted in their entirety by Western agencies, but were

not decoded and processed in time to reach the British Home Office and police before the demonstration during which Constable Fletcher was fatally wounded took place. The newspaper said that the wholesale expulsion of the People’s Bureau was seen by the British Government as the only way of ending the deadlock in the six-day-old police siege of the mission.

It also reported that a deal to sever diplomatic relations between London and Tripoli was also under consideration early yesterday.

Senior police officers believe that the 30 to 40 Libyans in the bureau and their families could be ordered out within 48 hours. This would mean the killer of Constable Fletcher would probably go free. But the safety of British Embassy staff in Tripoli and 8000 other British subjects in Libya is now considered by British Ministers as allimportant. The “Sunday Telegraph” said this strategy was endorsed by Mrs Thatcher at a meeting at Chequers on Friday night witlr the Home Secretary.

The Government was clear in its rejection of Colonel Gadaffi’s offer to send a Libyan fact-finding team to London and to put on trial in Tripoli any Libyan implicated in the shooting. “It is surely self-evident that this incident happened in British jurisdiction and it is for British law to proceed with inquiries,” a Foreign Office spokesman said. The Libyan Government denies the shots were fired from within the building. The British Ambassador, Mr Oliver Miles, has held three rounds of talks in Tripoli in three days with Libya’s Foreign Minister, Ali AbdelSalam Tureiki.

Mr Brittan said yester-, day: “We really do feel this is a matter that must be resolved quickly.” But he said after a special Ministerial meeting on the crisis that negotiations were proceeding “painfully slowly.”