Compensations for Ireland Republican Army (IRA) which was supported by Muammar Gaddafi in the 1980s saw new progress after a decade of attempts to use Libyan frozen assets in the UK to compensate victims.
A London-based IRA victim has hailed the “first real progress” in a decade-long campaign to secure compensation for victims of Libyan-sponsored terrorism.
Jonathan Ganesh, a survivor of the 1996 IRA docklands bombing and the president of the Docklands Victims Association, has been campaigning for years for victims to be compensated using assets which once belonged to Muammar Gaddafi.
An estimated £12 billion worth of Libyan assets linked to Col Gaddafi are frozen in the UK.
Foreign Office minister Andrew Murrison has now confirmed in writing that a “scoping exercise” into possible compensation payments is to take place, adding in a letter to the chairman of the Northern Ireland Affairs Select Committee at Westminster Simon Hoare, that the appointment of a ‘special representative’ of the foreign secretary on UK victims of Gaddafi-sponsored IRA terrorism “reflects the government’s commitment to victims”.
Meanwhile, Ganesh said there is this terrible injustice where the Gaddafi regime has compensated American victims of terrorism, French victims and German victims. But the UK citizens and Irish citizens have been left behind.
In the 1980s, Gaddafi supplied massive shipments of weapons, including Semtex, to the IRA. The material from Libya was used by the IRA in a deadly campaign of bombings across the UK.
