French airliner victims families get US$170m from Libya

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, January 09, 2004

French airliner victims families get US$170m from Libya

Libya and the families of the victims of the 1989 bombing of a French airliner on Friday signed a 170-million-US-dollar compensation deal.

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Libya and the families of the victims of the 1989 bombing of a French airliner on Friday signed a 170-million-US-dollar compensation deal.

The deal was signed by Abdu Salam, director of the Kadhafi Foundation, Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, a spokesman for some of the families, Francis Szpiner, attorney for the French victims' rights group SOS Attentats, and a representative of the Caisse desDepots et Consignations, a state-owned financial agency.

A total of 42.5 million dollars were paid in cheque at the signing ceremony held at the office of a lawyer in Paris. Three payments will follow, with each of the victims families receiving 1 million dollars in the end.

Seventeen people representing 11 victims families were also present. Of those killed aboard the DC-10 of the French airline UTA, which crashed over the west African state of Niger in September 1989, 102 were Africans and 54 were French.

The Paris-Tripoli talks over the compensation for the DC-10 victims faltered in past months, casting a shadow on the normalization of French-Libyan relations.

Relatives of the victims insisted on a pay-out comparable to the 2.7 billion dollars Tripoli paid to the relatives of those killed in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.

An agreement in principle was signed on Sept. 11 on a financial package. As a result France lifted its threat to veto a UN resolution removing sanctions on Libya.

But since then, Libya has been reluctant to come up with the compensation and representatives of the Kadhafi Foundation -- a body run by Kadhafi's son Seif al-Islam, which is handling the negotiations -- claimed the French side was reneging on its part of the September agreement.

On Thursday, President of the French Senate, Christian Poncelet, and visiting Libyan Foreign Minister Abdul-Rahman Mohammad Shalgam jointly announced that a deal has been reached. They said the progress will contribute to the development of bilateral ties. ADC-10 belonging to the French airline UTA went down over the west African state of Niger in September 1989, killing 170 people, including 54 French nationals.

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