Source: RTÉ.ie
State Papers 1986 Reveals Gaddafi’s Funding IRA to kill Margaret Thatcher and her family. Political writers trawled through the confidential State Papers, which have been kept under lock and key for 30 years until today.
On the 95th anniversary of the Treaty, the State Papers released today reveal a startling admission on many kept secrets. One of these secretes has to do with a senior Libyan official telling an Irish diplomat Libya wanted to fund the IRA to kill Margaret Thatcher and her family.
In June 1986, the Irish government publicly expressed deep concern after Libyan Major General Abdussalam Ahmed Jalloud made comments about renewing Libyan support for the IRA.
The Irish ambassador to Rome, Eamon Kennedy, was asked to make an urgent visit to Tripoli to express the government’s “grave concern about any support or renewal of support by Libya for the Provisional IRA.”
Minister for Foreign Affairs Peter Barry told the ambassador to tell the authorities in Libya that “the IRA is the enemy of the Irish State” and such support was “unacceptable”.
Documents released today detail Ambassador Kennedy’s account of his June 21 visit to Tripoli where he met Saad Mujber, Chief of Protocol, who he said, “is more than a chief of protocol. He is very close to Gaddafi and is the political link between the people’s committees and the foreign office.”
The Libyan official was blaming the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for helping US President Ronald Reagan with attacks on Libyan cities Tripoli and Benghazi.
He told the Irish official: “Thatcher and her children will have to pay, let there be no doubt about that. If she does not leave office she and her family will be destroyed.“
In the early 1980s Libya had called off its co-operation with the IRA in London because it was informed that innocent civilians were suffering.
During Ambassador Kennedy’s two hour meeting with Mr Mujber, for some of the time the Libyan “was screaming, weeping and sweating all at once”.
“But towards the end he said something to which I took serious exception. He said that at the next popular congress he would advocate, despite all I had said, full support for the IRA against Thatcher. ‘What could the IRA not do, he asked, if they had $50million to use against Thatcher’?”
The ambassador said this threat would impair Irish-Libyan relations. He added: “I have personally doubt that Libya will reactivate its support for the IRA in Britain and will endeavour to murder Thatcher and her family. Two hours with Saad Mujber made that quite clear.”
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