Libyans locked every door

Press, 2 May 1984, Page 8

Libyans locked every door

NZPA-AAP London The police and soldiers blasted their way into the former Libyan Embassy yesterday, blowing open a back door with a remotecontrolled shotgun.

The former British Consul in Libya had confirmed that the Libyan police had entered the British Embassy building in Tripoli but said the procedure had been done discreetly, Reuter said.

“The Libyan authorities are now in the embassy premises,” George Anderson said. “All was done very discreetly and there was no question of forced entry.” In London the police discovered that Libya’s expelled diplomats and students had locked every door. It would take hours to establish whether the fivestorey building had been booby-trapped and days to search for arms, said a spokesman. “It may be necessary to carry out other controlled i

explosions,” the spokesman said as the police and Royal Engineers bomb disposal experts began examining the elegant Georgian house at No. 5 St James’s Square. After more than four hours of searching a police spokeswoman said: “We’ve opened a number of doors, and no arms have been found.”

She dismissed a report by the official Libyan news agency, Jana, quoting a Libyan weekly, “Al-Zahaf AlAkhdar” as giving a warning that nuclear arms and chemical weapons had been left in the embassy. A Saudi Arabian diplomat, looking after Libya’s interests in London since Britain formally broke diplomatic ties with Libya at midnight Sunday (local time), stood by as the police sent a tracked robot equipped with shotgun and television camera up to the embassy door. The robot, known as “wheelbarrow,” was developed to check Irish Republi-

can Army bombs in Northern Ireland, and can blow open doors, go up stairs, and blow off detonator mechanisms, making it safe for experts to defuse bombs manually. Once the building was pronounced safe forensic scientists were to scour it, dusting window ledges for traces of gunpowder to establish the firing point, and seeking evidence that the embassy had been used to stash arms. British officials say that they suspect arms had been smuggled out in diplomatic bags that left with the Libyans. Scotland Yard said that the back door had been used for the break-in to minimise disruption in the square and because it meant “fewer people were in danger.” Mr Anderson is one of two British diplomats working in Tripoli from the Italian Embassy. He said that he and the former administration officer, Reid Norton, had

driven past the embassy and seen the Libyans entering the building from the back door. They had then telephoned their Italian colleagues to get details of what was happening inside. The Italian Ambassador, Mr Alessandro Quaroni, said that about 15 to 20 Libyans had entered the embassy, escorted by the ambassador and members of his staff. Some revolutionary students had been among the group but they were asked ’to remain outside and watch the proceedings from the outside of the seafront embassy. The British Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret Thatcher, conferred with senior Cabinet officials as Opposition members of Parliament heaped blame on her Government for not cracking down sooner on what one called the “agency for murder.” A spokesman at Mrs Thatcher’s 10 Downing Street office said that the meeting with the Home

Secretary, Mr Leon Brittan, who handled the crisis, and the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was in the Far East during the siege, had been “a stocktaking session.” “The Government has already given enough indication of the information it had about the embassy being used as a sanctuary and agency for murder and bombing in Britain,” the Labour Party’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, Denis Healey, said. Labour would press Mrs Thatcher for “proper” explanations on why she did nothing when a four-mem-ber “revolutionary student” committee took over the embassy in February, he said. That was followed by bombings against Libyan exiles in London and Manchester in March, in which 23 people were injured. Mr Brittan asserts that no direct link had been established between the bombings or assassinations in

1981 of three Libyans and the People’s Bureau. The Conservatives also face renewed questioning about persistent reports that British intelligence had intercepted a message from Tripoli telling the embassy to use violence against the demonstrators on April 17. American officials said that the United States had said little about the crisis for fear that an injudicious remark could have inflamed it. They said that the Administration felt freer to speak now that the crisis had eased. The officials indicated that the United States did not intend to take a lead role in pressing for Libya’s isolation. They suggested that a British diplomatic effort might make more sense since Britain had been the victim of Libyan actions this time.