Kadafi Acts to Keep Regime From Being Probed : Terrorism: His moves appear aimed at ensuring that he and other top officials will not be targeted in the Lockerbie case.

Col. Moammar Kadafi has replaced several top security officials and ordered the release of information on Libya’s support for the Irish Republican Army in what appears to be a last-ditch attempt to assure that his regime will not be the target of ongoing terrorism probes, according to diplomats in the Libyan capital.

Kadafi in the past two weeks has replaced his top personal security adviser, Abdullah Sanusi, one of those being sought for questioning in the 1989 bombing of a French airliner over Niger, and at least four other senior officials within Libya’s secret security services, diplomatic sources said.

There have also been reports that up to 13 senior Libyan military officers have been executed following an attempted coup d’etat shortly before United Nations sanctions went into effect against Libya on April 15, sources here said.

Libyan officials are scheduled to meet with British government representatives Tuesday in Geneva to disclose details of Libyan support for the IRA, just two days before Libya’s General People’s Congress is to make a final decision on whether to comply with demands for handing over two Libyan security officials suspected in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people.

Libya appears to be seeking assurances that top regime officials, including Kadafi himself, will not be targeted in the Lockerbie case should the General People’s Congress clear the way for release of the two suspects, possibly by allowing the two men to turn themselves over voluntarily, diplomats close to the case said.

At the same time, they said, Kadafi appears to be bracing himself against the possibility of escalated sanctions, including a full-scale boycott or trade embargo, should he not get the assurances he needs for handing over the suspects.

Libya already is the subject of a two-month-old U.N. air and military embargo that has shut down all international air travel and resulted in the departure of an estimated 1,700 Russian military advisers, leaving Libya’s air defense system “at zero” and extremely vulnerable to a military air strike, defense analysts here said.

“At this point, their air defenses are negligible, and they know that,” said one Western analyst in Tripoli, in large part because the Russian advisers were responsible for most maintenance and radar observation. “Even before, it wasn’t worth much, but the whole thing collapses without the Russians.”

Kadafi, with Egyptian mediation, is seeking assurances from the United States and Britain that the Lockerbie affair will come to a conclusion if the two suspects named in pending indictments are allowed to be tried in the West.

Perhaps as a way to win such assurances, he has replaced at least five top security officials in recent weeks, including Sanusi, the brother-in-law of his wife and one of Kadafi’s chief lieutenants.

Earlier in the crisis, the Libyans appointed a new director of foreign intelligence, Youssef Abdul Qader Dobri, in what analysts said was an attempt to begin housecleaning within the secret services and present an acceptable public face for meetings with U.N. and Western leaders.

Diplomatic sources said it is likely that Libya will wait until after Tuesday’s meeting with British officials in Geneva to make a final decision on whether the General People’s Congress, the equivalent of a Parliament but closely controlled by Kadafi, will clear the way for the suspects to be turned over--or to volunteer--for trial.

The Congress is scheduled to meet Thursday, the 22nd anniversary of the evacuation of the last American military bases in Libya, to consider the issue. A majority of local councils recommended against extradition of the suspects, but it is widely believed that Kadafi has submitted the question to the General People’s Congress as a way of creating a face-saving way out of the international deadlock in the event he gets the private assurances from the West he is seeking that the regime itself is not threatened.

“The Libyans must decide, you must decide anything, and when you do, don’t hold Moammar . . . responsible,” he told the local councils when they convened not long ago. But Kadafi also reiterated that “to try them in an enemy country is impossible.”

Kadafi also appears to be gambling on the unlikelihood that the U.N. Security Council could agree to significantly tighten the sanctions against Libya in the event that he does not get the assurances he needs for turning over the suspects, diplomats said.

The Libyans, they said, appear ready to gamble that Germany, Italy and Spain, all of which countries rely significantly on Libyan oil and other trade, would oppose a boycott of oil exports that supply Libya with 95% of its foreign earnings.

Libya also announced this week that it would not seek an exemption from the U.N. air embargo to send Libyan worshipers to the annual pilgrimage at Mecca in Saudi Arabia, arguing that the international community has no right to force Muslims to seek special permission to make the Muslim pilgrimage.