A former British intelligence officer has claimed on British television that Britain spent £100,000 financing an assassination attempt on the Libyan leader, Col Moammar Gadafy.
The allegation was made by Mr David Shayler, a former member of Britain's security service, MI5, who was arrested in Paris last weekend and is fighting moves to extradite him back to Britain.
The British government allowed Mr Shayler to appear last night on a BBC Panorama programme after BBC lawyers submitted parts of the script to government lawyers.
Mr Shayler said Britain's foreign intelligence service M16 had given the money to an Arab agent codenamed Tunworth to finance the 1996 plot. The Foreign Office had already denied Mr Shayler's allegations.
The plan was to kill Col Gadafy by planting a bomb under his motorcade. But, Mr Shayler said, the bomb was placed by Islamic extremists under the wrong car, killing several bystanders.
A former MI6 agent, Mr Richard Tomlinson, was taken off a Qantas plane in Auckland yesterday as he attempted to fly to Australia, after being served with an injunction to stop him revealing intelligence details, Television New Zealand reported.