By Jamie Prentis.
Tunis, 29 may 2017:
UN envoy Martin Kobler has begun steps to organise the first new meetings of the National Dialogue, the State Council said today.
Kobler held discussions with the Council’s Dialogue delegation, led by its deputy president Mohamed Bagi, today in Tripoli. The two sides looked at possible amendments to the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA).
The State Council said Kobler was putting the final touches to talks that will see it and the House of Representatives (HoR) sit down at the Dialogue table to hammer out changes to the LPA.
Bagi also used the meeting to condemn the recent Egyptian bombing of Derna and said it violated Libya’s sovereignty and undermined Dialogue efforts.
He told Kobler the UN needed to urgently investigate “these flagrant violations before they lead to other negative repercussions”.
The presidents of the HoR and State Council, Ageela Saleh and Abdulrahmen Sewehli, finally held talks in Rome last month in a widely praised step that brought hope Libya’s political deadlock could be broken
Kobler also today met PC head Faiez Serraj and said afterwards that the violence in the country had to stop and that it was time for a political solution. Kobler arrived in the capital from Tunis, despite the uncovering of an apparent plot to kill him. Hashem Abedi, the younger brother of Manchester suicide bomber Sulaiman Abedi allegedly confessed to his Rada interrogators after his arrest last week that he had been planning to assassinate the UN chief in Tripoli.