Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

556 • QADDAFI, MUAMMARBoth Great Britain and the United States also have had concernsover Libyan state terrorism against anti-Qaddafi Libyans living as permanentresidents or students in those countries. During 1980 Libyanagents murdered at least 10 anti-Qaddafi dissidents in Great Britainand Western Europe. Later, such agents also tried to hire assassins tokill dissidents within the United States. During anti-Qaddafi demonstrationsoutside the Libyan embassy in St. James Square, London,on 17 April 1984, members of the Libyan “People’s Bureau” openedfire with automatic weapons on the crowds outside, injuring 11Libyan protestors and killing a young British policewoman, YvonneFletcher. Both Britain and the United States retaliated for such incidentsby expelling and blacklisting Libyan diplomats involvedin such behavior. In 1986 the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) arrested members of the El Rukn gang in Chicago for involvementin a Libyan-sponsored plot to attack U.S. government officesand to shoot down U.S. airliners within the United States.The economic sanctions imposed on Libya in April 1992 underUN Security Council Resolution 748, which were tightened on 11November 1993, inflicted over $23.5 billion in damages on Libya’seconomy and led to shortages of basic goods and inflation rates of600 percent or more. The decade of economic sanctions and increasingunpopularity at home forced Qaddafi to curtail the adventurism ofhis regime outside Libya and to try to come to terms with the UnitedStates, Britain, and other nations he had previously challenged andconfronted. The Islamic fundamentalist insurgency in Algeria mayalso have led Qaddafi to seek a tactical accommodation with theWest, for Qaddafi was an inveterate foe of the Muslim Brotherhoodand similar movements and cooperated strongly with Algerian andFrench authorities to counter the activities of the Armed IslamicGroup and Islamic Salvation Front.By 1997 Qaddafi had forced Abu Nidal to leave Libya, and by1999 he had closed down the camps of hard-line Palestinian factionsand had given the British files on the Irish Republican Army as wellas promising to help British police investigate the fatal shooting ofthe British constable that occurred outside the Libyan embassy inLondon in 1984. Qaddafi also assisted France in identifying andbringing to trial those Libyan agents responsible for the UTA Flight772 bombing that occurred in September 1989. Qaddafi’s cooperationin handing over the two suspects wanted for the bombing of Pan