Gadhafi plans to visit St. John's

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi will visit Newfoundland next week, the Prime Minister's Office confirmedThursday, but he can expect a chilly receptionand a reprimand from Canada.

Gadhafi is making a one-day stopover in St. John's on his way back to Libya from New York after his visit to the United Nations General Assembly, where he gave a90-minute speech Wednesday.

"This is not an official visit to Canada," a written statement from PMO spokesman Dimitri Soudas said.

"Prime Minister [Stephen] Harper has asked Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon to go to St. John's and meet the Libyan leader," Soudas wrote.

"Minister Cannon will voice Canada's strong disapproval over the hero's welcome organized for Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, the man responsible for the Lockerbie terrorist bombing. It constituted an insult to all the victims who died, including Canadians."

Late Thursday afternoon, Cannon told Radio-Canada reporters that that the federal government wants to make its position on Gadhafi's visit clear.

"The incidents that took place years ago had Canadians losing their lives," he said. " In no way shape or form does this government support terrorism, and we denounce it at every opportunity and that's what we will be doing."

Newfoundland and Labrador government officials say no one from the province willwelcome Gadhafi.

"We don't have any comment, and no provincial officials will be meeting with him," an official in Premier Danny Williams's office told CBC News on Thursday.

St. John'sMayor Dennis O'Keefe says he has no plans to meet with Gadhafi either, but he said Libya's leader won't be alone while he's in Newfoundland.

O'Keefesaid he's heard that Gadhafi will be in the city with a delegation of 130 people.

"They are going to be dispersed around different hotels, and Col. Gadhafi would be looking for a separate site on which he wants to pitch a Bedouin tent," O'Keefe said.

Led successful coup at 27

The Libyan Embassy in Ottawawould neither confirm nor deny thatGadhafi will stop in the province,adding it will have more information later.

At 27years old,Gadhafi led a successful coup in 1969 against King Idris I,abolished the 1951 constitution andtook poweralong with a 12-member revolutionary command council.

In 1988, a bombexploded aboarda Pan American 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. More than a decade later, Libya handed over two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing for a trial in the Netherlands by Scottish judges. Lamen Khalifa Fhimah was acquitted, while al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2001.

Al-Megrahi, who is said to be dying,was recently released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds and flown back to Libya.