Boris Johnson in compensation talks with Libya for IRA’s Docklands Semtex bombing victims

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has raised the issue of compensation for IRA victims of Libyan-supplied Semtex bombs including those in London Docklands in a meeting with Libya’s prime minister.

He discussed the issue in talks with Fayez al-Serraj when he flew to Tripoli last week which were aimed at diplomatic recognition of Libya, Northern Ireland’s News Letter reports.

Mr Johnson’s meeting came two days after a Commons report criticising failures to secure the same compensation for British victims as those in France, Germany and the USA.

Victims including two men killed and 50 others injured in the 1996 Canary Wharf Midland Bank atrocity had been “let down” by successive governments over the years, the Northern Ireland Affairs committee declared last week.

Jonathan Ganesh, former Midlands Bank security guard who was injured in the bombing himself, set up the Docklands Victims’ Association which has been campaigning for 20 years for compensation.

He represents families on Millwall’s Barkantine housing estate on the Isle of Dogs which caught the full blast. Two of his friends were killed, newsagent Inam Bashir, 27, and shop-worker John Jeffries, 29.

The government was accused by the parliamentary committee of “a litany of missed opportunities” including Blair’s meeting with Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi before the downfall in 2011 of the dictator who had been the main weapons and Semtex supplier to the IRA in the 1980s and 90s.