Britain has been buying off Libyan officials with hefty additional fees in order to expedite the troubled evacuation of UK nationals

This is a humiliating development: our ministers have further enriched the regime at the very moment when Gaddafi's henchmen are slaughtering his people. As with other aspects of the rescue effort, the comparison with the response of other nations does ministers no credit. It is difficult to imagine the French military asking permission for its air force to rescue French citizens earlier this week, much less paying the regime bribes to do so.

The violence in Libya continues to pose a threat to British lives - and with them, our Government's credibility. The British evacuation effort been both late and ramshackle: around 500 Britons were brought out yesterday but scores remain. Now it also appears that the Government effectively paid the Gaddafi regime a bribe, in the form of greatly increased landing charges, to extricate our citizens from Tripoli, partly as a result of having finally arrived so late in the chaos.

Meanwhile the international community is moving towards punitive action against Libya, with Britain and France backing UN-sponsored sanctions and talk of a no-fly zone being imposed against Gaddafi's forces. The latter would be entirely justified

Britain has been buying off Libyan officials with hefty additional fees in order to expedite the troubled evacuation of UK nationals, according to senior government figures.
The revelations over the demands for what one senior figure described as “bribes” underlines the problems faced by the government as it oversees a rescue effort that has been criticised as inadequate, poorly co-ordinated and slow.
Speaking in Downing Street after a specially convened meeting of the National Security Council and Cobra emergency planning committee, David Cameron stressed the government was doing “everything we can” to help the 200 British citizens still stranded.