British Prime Minister Tony Blair will visit Libya "as soon as convenient", Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Tuesday following landmark talks with Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel Rahman Shalgham.
"We are hoping very much that a visit can be arranged as soon as convenient, but no date has yet been fixed," Straw told a joint press conference following the highest-level contact between the two nations for more than 20 years.
Shalgham met Blair at Downing Street and handed him a personal letter from Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi.
Shalgham's two-day visit to London marks another major step for Libya away from international pariah status since it pledged in December to give up its weapons of mass destruction.
Straw hailed his counterpart's visit - the first by a Libyan foreign minister since 1969 - as "a historic trip" and described a one-on-one meeting he held with Shalgham as "very useful".
His meeting with Blair came on the same day as Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arrived in Libya to hold discussions with Kadhafi, becoming the first major western leader to visit the oil-rich state since it came in from the cold.
"It is tangible proof of the improved relations between Libya and the UK," Straw said.
Ties between the nations were shattered in 1984 when a British policewoman was shot dead from inside the Libyan embassy in London as she monitored an anti-Libyan demonstration in the street outside.
Four years later a US airliner was downed by a bomb over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people. Libya eventually accepted responsibility and agreed to pay 2.7 billion dollars (2.2 billion euros) in compensation to families of the victims, but only after years of United Nations sanctions.
Tripoli and London formally re-established diplomatic relations in 1999.
The murder of the policewoman still had to be resolved, Straw said.
Comments
Comments are closed.