Official: Gadhafi cancels Canada visit

TORONTO — Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has canceled a planned stopover in Canada next week, a Canadian government official said Saturday.

The official said that Gadhafi would not be landing as originally planned in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on Tuesday to refuel his plane and stay for a night. The official said hotel reservations have been canceled and Libya’s advance team has left.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid speaking for another country’s head of state.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesman Sgt. Wayne Newell later confirmed they were told Gadhafi was not coming but said no reason was given.

The Libyan Embassy in Ottawa did not return calls seeking comment.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper had planned on sending Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon to meet with Gadhafi to express Canada’s displeasure over the hero’s welcome Libya gave to the only man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing. All 259 people aboard Pan Am Flight 103 and 11 people on the ground died when a bomb blew up the plane over Scotland in 1988.

Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence agent, was released from a Scottish prison last month on compassionate grounds because doctors said he was dying of prostate cancer.

Harper’s office said the welcoming ceremony constituted an insult to all the victims who died in that act of terrorism — including Canadians.

Gadhafi is attending a weekend Africa-South America summit in Venezuela. He was scheduled to stop in St. John’s after that meeting. It was not an official visit to Canada.

St. John’s mayor Dennis O’Keefe had said Gadhafi wanted to pitch his Bedouin-style tent during his visit.

The Libyan leader had a difficult time finding a place to pitch his tent while in the New York area this past week for the United Nations General Assembly session. Requests for space in Manhattan’s Central Park; Englewood, New Jersey, and Manhattan’s Upper East Side were all rejected. Gadhafi stayed at the city’s Libyan Mission after arriving Tuesday.

When his tent was spotted Tuesday in the terraced courtyard of a stone manor house on property owned by real estate tycoon Donald Trump in suburban Bedford, New York, it didn’t go over well. Trump hinted he had been tricked into renting his land, politicians declared Gadhafi unwelcome and Bedford issued a stop-work order, saying the tent violated various zoning and housing codes.

The Libyan leader has been trying to restore his country’s standing in the world and transform it from a pariah state to an accepted member of the international community.

Gadhafi engineered a rapprochement with his former critics following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He renounced terrorism, dismantled Libya’s secret nuclear program, accepted his government’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid compensation to the victims’ families. Such moves led both Canada and the U.S. to restore diplomatic relations with Libya.