Libya seeks sanctions’ end with Lockerbie settlement

? For years, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has been trying to get into America’s good graces. He condemned the Sept. 11 attacks, arrested Islamic militants and handed over two Libyans for trial in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Washington wasn’t moved.

But Libya’s agreement on a financial settlement with the families of the 270 Lockerbie victims could finally open the most important door that has remained closed to Gadhafi: the lifting of U.S. sanctions that have kept American oil companies away from Libyan oil fields.

The U.S. government has not commented on the Lockerbie settlement announced Wednesday by lawyers for the victims’ families. A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Thursday that the administration had not reached any decisions on sanctions.

Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam made clear Thursday that the Lockerbie agreement was part of the drive for international rehabilitation that Gadhafi began in the mid-1990s.

Shalqam said that if Washington did not lift the sanctions it imposed in 1986 and remove Libya’s name from the State Department list of states that support terrorism, his country would pay only half the agreed $2.7 billion in compensation to the Lockerbie families.

“We accepted this only after we got the necessary guarantees from the other parties,” he said in Tripoli, Libya’s capital. He did not elaborate.

Under the agreement outlined by lawyers, Libya was supposed to transfer the $2.7 billion into an escrow account by Thursday and follow up with a letter to the United Nations admitting responsibility for the Lockerbie attack.

Today is the target for the United States and Britain to send letters saying Libya has met requirements for formally ending suspended U.N. sanctions, for Britain to circulate a draft resolution on lifting those sanctions and for the State Department to meet with victims’ families, U.N. diplomats said.

Libya has been keen to shed the image of a terrorism supporter, so it can regain international legitimacy and give its economy a boost by bringing back U.S. oil companies.

Crash investigators inspect the nose section of Pan Am Flight 103, a Boeing 747 airliner that crashed in December 1988 in a field near Lockerbie, Scotland, killing more than 270 people. The United States and Britain have reached an understanding with Libya requiring Moammar Gadhafi's government to renounce terrorism, accept responsibility for the 1988 bombing of the Pan Am jet and compensate victims' families, U.N. diplomats said this week.