Mubarak Tests Limits of Libya Air-Travel Ban

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak flew to neighboring Libya on Thursday and visited with its leader, Col. Moammar Kadafi, in the latest challenge to international air-travel restrictions there.

The trip to see Kadafi, who is recovering from hip-replacement surgery, was not a direct violation of the sanctions imposed on Libya because Egypt apparently received permission from the United Nations sanctions committee.

Still, Mubarak’s journey underlined a growing mood in Arab and African capitals to defy the 6-year-old sanctions against Libya, which are widely perceived in this region as unfair.

That Mubarak, the leader of the most populous Arab country and a nation closely aligned with the United States, would take this action is likely to encourage other leaders to question the need to travel to Libya only by land.

Mubarak visited Kadafi in Beida on Thursday morning and returned to Cairo in the evening.

“Egypt formerly requested and received permission to go,” chief U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard was quoted as saying in New York.

Mubarak’s trip had not been announced in advance, and when he appeared live on Libyan television, many people assumed that the Egyptian leader had deliberately defied the U.N. and the wishes of the United States, which is Egypt’s chief foreign aid patron.

Egyptian state television showed Mubarak’s aircraft landing at Abrak airport near Beida and Mubarak studying X-rays of Kadafi’s hip, which Libya’s official news agency said he broke while exercising.

Libya has been under sanctions since 1992 for failing to hand over two suspects in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people. Kadafi has offered to turn the suspects over for trial under Scottish law at the World Court in The Hague, but Washington and London have refused the compromise.

The Organization of African Unity last month voted to ignore the flight embargo after the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that it had jurisdiction to hear the Lockerbie case. After that decision, the presidents of Chad and Niger flew to Tripoli on Monday, defying the U.N. sanctions.

Kadafi has repeatedly tried to break out of the embargo, first by flying Muslim hajj pilgrims from Libya to Mecca in recent years. In June 1996, he received Egyptian permission to land in Cairo to attend a pan-Arab summit called after the election in Israel of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Although Kadafi is viewed as a maverick in the Arab world, Egypt and Libya have maintained cordial relations.