Thursday December 31 7:19 AM ET Libya Asks U.S. To Hand Over Reagan-Era Officials TUNIS, Tunisia (Reuters) - Libya wants the United States to hand over nine officials of the Reagan administration -- one of them dead -- to face charges in connection with U.S. air raids on Libya in 1986, the official Libyan news agency JANA said. The agency quoted the Libyan attorney-general as saying in a statement that warrants would be sent to the United States requesting the men's arrest and extradition to face charges in Tripoli. The report, monitored in Tunis Thursday, did not make the handover a condition for the handover of two Libyans accused by Washington and London of killing 270 people in the bombing of an airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie 10 years ago. But the attorney-general drew a parallel with the U.S. and British warrants, which are backed up with U.N. sanctions, by saying Libya would appeal to the U.N. Security Council if the United States did not hand over its citizens. ``Our right is based on the fact that the U.S. and Britain turned to the Security Council in a lesser case than this one, namely the suspicion against two Libyan citizens in the so-called Lockerbie incident,'' he said. The accused from the administration of then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan included national security adviser John Poindexter, his deputy Robert Gates and aide Oliver North as well as Central Intelligence Agency director William Casey. Casey died in 1987, and the attorney-general, who was not named, did not make clear how he expected Washington to honor the arrest warrant against him. Other indictees were senior State Department official Robert Oakley, Frank Kelso, the then commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, two U.S. air force pilots and a weapons officer. Libya considers the men responsible for U.S. air raids on Tripoli and Benghazi in April 1986. It says 40 people were killed including a girl adopted by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, whose house in the Azizia barracks in Tripoli was destroyed. Washington said the raids were in response to an explosion at a Berlin discotheque in which two Americans were killed. The United States blamed Libya but Tripoli denied the charge, just as it denies all involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. Earlier this month U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan held meetings in Libya in the hope of persuading it finally to hand over the Lockerbie suspects, for whom arrest warrants were issued in 1992. But although Libya has agreed to hand the suspects over for trial in the Netherlands, it continues to reject American and British demands that they should be tried by Scottish judges and serve any prison sentence in Scotland.
