'US, UK spy agencies had links with Gaddafi'

London: American and British spy agencies built close ties with Libyan intelligence services during the 'War on Terror', according to documents which says, prisoners were offered to the Muammar Gaddafi regime for interrogation under a controversial "rendition" programme.

Secret files have been unearthed in Tripoli that reveal the astonishingly close links that existed between British and American governments and Muammar Gaddafi, the Independent said. The documents were discovered from the office of the former spy chief of Gaddafi.

The documents chart show how prisoners were offered to the Libyans for brutal interrogation by the Tripoli regime under the highly controversial "rendition" programme, and also how details of exiled opponents of the Libyan dictator in the UK were passed on to the regime by MI6.

The papers show that British officials actually helped write a draft speech for Colonel Gaddafi while he was trying to rehabilitate his regime from the pariah status to which it had sunk following its support for terrorist movements.

Further documents disclose how, at the same time, the US and UK acted on behalf of Libya in conducting negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

With the efforts they had expended in cultivating their contacts with the regime, the British were unwilling, at times, to share their "Libya connection" with the closet ally, the US. In a letter to his Libyan intelligence counterpart, an MI6 officer described how he refused to pass on the identity of an agent to Washington.

The documents, many of them incendiary in their implications, were found at the private offices of Moussa Koussa, Col Gaddafi's right hand man, and regime security chief, who defected to Britain in the days following the February revolution.