THE UK Foreign Office yesterday urged British nationals to leave Benghazi at once in response to ‘a specific and imminent threat’ to Westerners from Al Qaeda and its supporters.
A notice on the Foreign Office website said: ‘Since September 2012, the Foreign Office has clearly advised against all travel to Benghazi and all areas of Libya, with the exception of Tripoli, Zuwara, Az Zawiya, al Khums, Zlitan and Misrata, and the coastal towns from Ras Lanuf to the Egyptian Border.
‘We are now aware of a specific and imminent threat to Westerners in Benghazi, and urge any British nationals who remained there against our advice to leave immediately.
‘We have updated our Travel Advice to reflect this. The British Embassy in Tripoli has been in contact with British Nationals for whom we have contact details to alert them to the Advice.’
This ‘advice’ constitutes a huge slap in the face for the British government who spent hundreds of millions supporting the ‘Benghazi revolutionaries’, including the use of massive air power in a campaign that culminated with the murder of Colonel Gadaffi.
Now UK citizens are running for their lives from the same ‘revolutionaries’.
It has also emerged that the terrorists who laid siege to the Amenas gas plant in Algeria also took part in the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi that killed the American ambassador to Libya.
An Algerian security official has told the New York Times that three of the surviving terrorists said they were aided by Egyptian extremists who were involved in the September 11 attack on the US consulate in eastern Libya.
The Egyptians were reportedly all killed during the special forces raid on the gas plant and Hillary Clinton, the outgoing Secretary of State, said on Wednesday the US was still investigating the link.
Clinton said that there was ‘no doubt’ that the Algerian terrorists had been armed with weapons obtained from Libya.
While testifying in Washington on the September 2012 attack in Benghazi, she said: ‘There is no doubt that the Algerian terrorists had weapons from Libya.
‘There is no doubt that the Malian remnants of AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) have weapons from Libya,’ Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Algeria’s prime minister has said that 37 hostages and 29 assailants were killed in the operation. Three US citizens were reportedly also killed in the attack.
The Islamist ‘Mulathameen Brigade’ claimed responsibility for the hostage crisis, warning it would carry out similar attacks until Western powers end what it called an attack on Muslims in Mali.
Russia, which backed a UN Security Council resolution on intervention in Mali, also backed the UN Security Council resolution that was used to organise the NATO attack on Libya.
However, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference on Wednesday: ‘Those whom the French and Africans are fighting now in Mali are the same people who overthrew the Gadaffi regime, those that our Western partners armed so that they would overthrow the Gadaffi regime.’
Saying that terrorist attacks had almost become a daily occurrence in the region, Lavrov reiterated: ‘The situation in Mali seems to be the consequence of events in Libya.’
