UK police trained officers in Libya
Police from England and Wales were sent to train their counterparts in Libya, it has emerged.
It comes after uproar at the news that a Northern Ireland police officer was sent to the country.
The National Policing Improvement Agency refused to name individual forces, but a spokesman confirmed that the officers came from across the UK.
According to The Daily Telegraph, the Metropolitan Police was one of the forces involved.
Earlier, victims of IRA violence had expressed disbelief at the training scheme. William Frazer, of victims group Fair (Families Acting for Innocent Relatives), said: "Here we have the police training the people who trained the IRA and supplied the weapons to murder their colleagues, it's just unbelievable."
Mr Frazer, who lost several security force family members to IRA terrorism, is part of a group travelling to Libya in October to press for compensation for IRA victims. He said: "You couldn't write the script for this - and if you did, it would be Monty Python. Without Libya, the IRA could not have done what they did in Northern Ireland, there is no doubt about that."
North Belfast MP Nigel Dodds, who is backing the compensation campaign, said what had happened was "totally inappropriate and offensive given the very recent history of what the Libyans have done in terms of the annals of terrorism in Northern Ireland".
It emerged that the Northern Ireland Policing Board gave the green light to a trip to Libya involving a superintendent at the beginning of this year. Ian Paisley Jnr, then chair of the board's human resources committee, backed the move.
Mr Paisley defended his decision, saying: "I was made aware of much wider and more detailed issues which, if others were aware of them, I believe would lead them to reach a very different conclusion.
"To be perfectly frank, you don't have to be a genius to work out why it would be useful to have a senior officer who has got intelligence skills to look at Libya and bring that information back to us."
