Mr Qaddafi's intelligence services, once feared as global troublemakers, are among the most ruthless in the region.
Mr Qaddafi insisted on his innocence but paid compensation to the victims' relatives.
Both, like Mr Qaddafi, referred to themselves in the third person and belittled the scale and intensity of the opposition.
But Mr Qaddafi, and Libya, seem on their way to becoming rather more friendly to the West than ever before.
Egyptian officials, however, point out that Mr Qaddafi himself has said that a solution to the Lockerbie problem is imminent.
In Cairo this week on a rare foreign visit, Mr Qaddafi came under intense pressure to make the final leap.
Mr Qaddafi may now be realising that, even for him, absolute idealism is too costly a luxury in the late 1990s.
Drawing Mr Qaddafi into the West's embrace, and keeping him there, has been a longstanding aim of Britain's, and other Western countries', foreign policy.
Britain appears to have reassured Mr Qaddafi that these points are covered in a clarifying letter addressed to him by Mr Annan in February.
Mr Qaddafi's second-eldest son, Seif-ul-Islam, provides a further impetus for change.
Even Mr Qaddafi, with all his dangerous capriciousness, must know it is only because of oil that Libya has been able to afford decades of damaging social experimentation.
Equally significant was Mr Qaddafi's decision, in 2003, to let British and American experts take apart his secret weapons programme, bringing a windfall of information about global smuggling networks.
Even the televised speeches by Saif al-Islam and Mr Qaddafi himself, while more chilling in tone, echoed performances by Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
Italy's foreign minister, Lamberto Dini, has been quick off the mark in congratulating Mr Qaddafi on returning to the fold, even suggesting that he takes part in a Euro-Med meeting next week.
It was not immediately clear whether all the fanfare would sway Mr Qaddafi, whose 30 years of rule have been marked by erratic policy shifts: a scheduled press conference was summarily cancelled.
In the late 1980s Libya fell under international sanctions after Mr Qaddafi was charged with sponsoring the mid-air bombing of two passenger aircraft, French and American, with the loss of more than 400 lives.
France is now waiting to hear whether Mr Qaddafi will honour his earlier undertaking to abide by the verdict of the court, presumably by imprisoning the men in Libya and paying compensation to the families of the 170 victims.
To flatter him, flag-waving schoolchildren lined the streets, Egyptian bedouins with links to Mr Qaddafi's own tribe cheered him on, and the state-controlled media offered blanket coverage of his forays to the Egyptian Museum and the tomb of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president whom Mr Qaddafi still idolises as a hero of Arab nationalism.
Mr. Qaddafi must leave and Libyans are entitled to a democratic future.
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The evidence suggests that, in response to the deal between Mr Berlusconi and Colonel Qaddafi, some who would otherwise have been trying to enter Italy are now finding their way into Europe farther east (and more often by land than by sea).
Some Libyans mistrust Mr Jibril, since he served as Qaddafi's economy minister before turning belatedly against him.
Britain has long enjoyed close relations with the Arab world but Mr Cameron was in opposition when Tony Blair helped rehabilitate Colonel Qaddafi as a reward for giving up his weapons of mass destruction, forsaking terrorism and helping out in the fight against al-Qaeda.
Mr Bush is hoping that Mr Assad will follow the lead of his fellow Arab dictator, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi, who agreed late last year to America's demands that he scrap his weapons of mass destruction.
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