French President Jacques Chirac on Wednesday arrived in Libya for the first such visit in more than half a century, reports reaching here from Tripoli said.

Talks between Chirac and Libyan leader Moammar Kadhafi will focus on Iraq, Africa, terrorism and economic cooperation, Chirac's spokesman Jerome Bonnafont said in Paris ahead of the trip.

This is the first such visit to Libya by a French head of state since 1951.

Chirac brought a delegation of business leaders, which is aimed at concluding engineering, exploration and sales accords with Libya.

French trade with Libya stands at a yearly 2.5 billion US dollars, including an annual 2 billion dollars of Libyan oil exports to France.

Chirac's visit follows meetings between Kadhafi and other European leaders this year, including British Prime Minister Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Kadhafi began to change his international image since last year, when he agreed to stop developing weapons of mass destruction, denounced terrorism and acknowledged responsibility for the Lockerbie and UTA plane bombings in the 1980s.