Libya To Buy Airbus Planes, Seeks French Fighters

`We are in negotiations on the Rafale,` he added, referring to the combat jet manufactured by France`s Dassault Aviation.

Libya will buy over 3 billion euros ($4.37 billion) worth of Airbus planes and is negotiating the purchase of French "Rafale" fighter jets, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's son said in a newspaper interview.

"We will buy more than 3 billion euros worth of Airbus (planes), a nuclear reactor, and we also want to buy numerous pieces of military equipment," Saif al-Islam, Gaddafi's son, told Le Figaro in an interview due to be published on Saturday.

It was not clear from his comments whether the Airbus deal was the finalization of a memorandum of understanding signed at the Paris Air Show in June for the purchase of six A350 XWBs and five A320s by Afriqiyah Airways and of four A350 XWBs, four A330-200s and seven A320s for Libyan Airlines. Airbus is a unit of EADS.

"We are in negotiations on the Rafale," he added, referring to the combat jet manufactured by France's Dassault Aviation.

Gaddafi, whose country is opening up to Western investment after decades of ostracism by the West, is due to visit France for five days from Dec. 10. It will be his first visit in more than 30 years.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy signed defense and nuclear energy accords during a controversial visit to Libya in July that followed Tripoli's release of foreign medics jailed for eight years for allegedly infecting children with HIV.

Paris has denied the arms and nuclear deals were a trade-off for the medics' release.

Libya wants to buy a nuclear reactor from France, Gaddafi's son said.

When asked why, he replied: "To produce our electricity, which will enable us to export all of our gas and oil."

That would mean another contract for Areva, days after the French state-controlled reactor maker clinched the biggest commercial nuclear power contract on record in China.

Libya ended decades of international isolation in 2003 when it agreed to halt a weapons program prohibited by the United Nations and pay compensation for the bombing of a U.S. airliner over Scotland in 1988 in which 270 people were killed.

The following year it signed a similar deal over the 1989 bombing of a French UTA plane over the West African country of Niger that killed 170 people. France convicted six Libyans in absentia for the UTA attack.

Asked about those six Libyans, Gaddafi's son said: "They are also innocent ... We have told the French authorities numerous times. We want a new trial." ($1=.6870 Euro)