The Tripoli-based administration said the CIA head, William Burns, met Libya’s interim premier weeks after authorities gave the US a suspect in the 1988 Lockerbie tragedy. Libyan media reported a CIA director’s Thursday meeting in Tripoli, the first since the 2012 Benghazi attack that killed the US ambassador and three others.
On its Facebook page, the Government of National Unity announced Burns’ arrival and meeting with Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah. In the tweet, Dbeibah’s government claimed, “Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibeh welcomed the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William Burns” in the cabinet office in Tripoli. It claimed Burns “underlined the necessity to expand economic and security cooperation between the two countries.” Burns also visited Khalifa Haftar, the eastern Libyan military strongman who has tried to overturn the Government of National Unity. The meeting took place in Haftar’s Benghazi headquarters. The CIA did not comment on such trips. Since Muammar Gaddafi’s 2011 overthrow in a NATO-backed rebellion, Libya has been in turmoil. Since 2014, the west and east have been at war. In 2021, the UN installed Dbeibah’s government as part of a peace deal, but the east’s main political factions no longer recognize it. Burns, CIA head since March 2021, visited Libya in 2014 as undersecretary of state for the Middle East. When Washington started healing relations with Gaddafi, he was the first US diplomat to visit. Dbeibah’s administration extradited a Libyan man suspected of manufacturing the bomb that downed a Pan Am aircraft over Scotland in 1988.
If convicted of “destruction of an aeroplane resulting in death” and two additional accusations relating to the bombing, which killed 270 people and was Britain’s greatest terror act, former intelligence officer Abu Agila Mohammad Masud Kheir al-Marimi may face life in jail. Political opponents, rights organizations, and relatives of Libyan captives who dread being turned over slammed Dbeibah over the action. Libya has no extradition pact with Washington.
