TRIPOLI (AFP) — Libya and the United States have resumed talks on compensation for the relatives of US victims of Libyan terrorist attacks and Libyan victims of US air raids, the daily Oya said on Thursday.
The US State Department has denied that the talks also involve compensation for Libyan victims of the American military response to Libyan attacks.
Talks are being held in Abu Dhabi according to Oya, a paper close to Seif al-Islam, eldest son of Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi, and are led by David Welch, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, and Libya's deputy Foreign Minister Abdelaati Laabidi.
This is the third round after earlier talks in London when, according to the US State Department, "both parties affirmed their desire to work together to resolve all outstanding claims in good faith and expeditiously through the establishment of a fair compensation mechanism."
According to Oya the talks are nearing agreement. They envisage setting up a "humanitarian fund" to regulate compensation claims from citizens of both countries.
Tripoli would not contribute to the fund which would be financed by American companies, the journal said.
Libya wants compensation for victims of US air raids against Tripoli and Benghazi on April 16, 1986, 11 days after three Americans were killed in a terrorist bombing of La Belle discotheque in Berlin.
The US raids killed 41 people and wounded 226, for whom Tripoli says it wants compensation.
"That is a concern that they have raised," said the US State Department spokesman after earlier talks.
He added: "There is no US government appropriated fund going to be used to satisfy those claims."
Libya has yet to complete payments to families of the victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people, an attack Tripoli admitted carrying out and for which it agreed to pay 2.7 billion dollars in compensation.
In January a US judge ordered Libya and six intelligence officials to pay billions of dollars in damages to relatives of Americans killed in the 1989 suitcase bombing of a French airliner over Niger.
Tripoli has never acknowledged involvement in this attack which killed 170 people, but agreed in 2004 to pay 170 million dollars to the families of the victims.
US-Libyan relations, broken since 1981, were restored in early 2004 a few weeks after Kadhafi announced that Tripoli was abandoning efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
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