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Sep 25, 2009

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi held "a friendly meeting" this week with relatives of some victims of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, he said in a CNN interview.

"It was a friendly meeting and encounter. I offered my condolences for the relatives who lost them," Gaddafi said in excerpts of the interview released on Friday.

Libya has formally accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and has paid billions of dollars to families of the victims.

Gaddafi was in the United States this week, speaking in New York to a United Nations meeting.

During the interview for "Fareed Zakaria GPS," which is to air on Sunday, Gaddafi was asked whether he regretted any possible role that Libyan officials might have played in the airplane bombing that killed 270 people.

He responded, "No one will support an action like that." Gaddafi went on to compare it to a 1986 U.S. military raid against Libya that killed around 40 people, including Gaddafi's daughter. "Whether it is Lockerbie or whether it is the '86 raid against Libya, we are all families ... terror in all its forms is a common enemy to all of us."

The U.S. military action, ordered by then-President Ronald Reagan, came after the bombing of a Berlin nightclub that was blamed on Libya.

While U.S.-Libyan relations have warmed somewhat in recent years, the U.S. Senate this week condemned the "lavish" welcome home ceremony last month for the convicted Pan Am bomber, Libyan agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who was released from a Scottish prison.