France suggests delay to UN Libya sanctions vote

France suggested yesterday delaying a UN vote on lifting sanctions imposed on Libya after Lockerbie, saying Muammar Gaddafi's country was still not offering enough compensation for a later French airline bombing.

Britain asked the Security Council on Monday quickly to end the sanctions, imposed after a US airliner was blown up over the Scottish town in 1988, now that Libya has agreed to pay up to $10 million to each of the families of the 270 people killed.

Russia said yesterday it backed Britain and the United States in thinking the time had come to scrap the measures, but France insisted on a better deal for the families of 170 people killed the following year on a plane over Niger.

The expected Lockerbie payment dwarfs the $34 million handed over earlier by Libya for the 1989 downing of the jet from the UTA French airline, for which a Paris court found six Libyans guilty in absentia but Libya denies responsibility.

Individual pay-outs for the UTA victims have been put at $33,780 at most.

"We cannot accept discrimination between victims of acts of terrorism," said French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Cecile Pozzo di Borgo.

"It could be a solution to have a delay... to let these negotiations go further," she said of continuing talks between representatives of the families of victims and a fund in Libya.

Russia, France, Britain, the United States and China all have veto power as the five permanent members of the 15-nation Security Council.

Russia supported Britain's draft resolution yesterday, Interfax news agency quoted an official as saying.

"Libya has fulfilled all the demands from the UN Security Council," said Andrei Granovsky, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Department of International Organisations.

"That is why we are in favour of lifting these sanctions." After years of wrangling Libya agreed to hand over two suspects for the Lockerbie bombing. One of them was convicted of murder by a Scottish court, convened in the Netherlands, in 2001.

The French spokeswoman declined to say whether Paris would use its veto, which it threatened to wield this year to block any bid by Washington to win UN approval for the Iraq war.