Libya and the Middle East

Luciana Berger Excerpts

Monday 28th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is trying to get me to prejudge what my right hon. Friend the Chancellor might say in the Budget. Obviously I cannot do that, but she makes a number of good points about how we have helped to rescue people from the desert. May I just say, again, how brave the pilots and crews of those aircraft were, because this extremely difficult mission involved a number of stops in desert areas and they were very uncertain as to what exactly they would find? All credit to them for the incredible work that they have done.

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Prime Minister tell the House what reports he has received about the killing of people in Tripoli who were celebrating after listening to inaccurate reports from authoritative sources that Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela?

[The Prime Minister]

I have not seen those specific reports, but clearly a number of people have been murdered in Tripoli, in Benghazi and in the rest of the country by that murderous regime. The responsibility for that lies squarely with Colonel Gaddafi and the people who run that regime, not with anybody else.