TRIPOLI (Agencies)
Incoming Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is facing a row with the Muslim world over plans to appoint a member of the far-right to his cabinet, press reports said.
The son of Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi warned Italy on Friday that the nomination of MP Roberto Calderoli to a ministerial post would have "disastrous consequences" for Rome-Tripoli ties.
Calderoli, 52, was a minister in the previous center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi when he sparked deadly riots in the former Italian colony after appearing on television wearing a T-shirt bearing a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
The Italian consulate in Libya was set on fire, 11 people were killed and another 69 injured in riots.
Calderoli also threatened to defile the proposed site of a mosque in Padua by walking a pig over the ground. When Italy beat France in the 2006 World Cup, he said France had "sacrificed its identity by fielding niggers, Muslims and communists," the UK Daily Telegraph reported.
Despite the controversies, which forced him to resign as a minister for reform in 2006, Calderoli, a senior member of the Northern League, is likely to get another job when Berlusconi picks his cabinet because of the strong results obtained by the Northern League in the general election.
"If he becomes a minister, that will have disastrous consequences for relations between Italy and Libya," Gaddafi's son Seif Al-Islam said in a statement released by the influential Gaddafi Foundation charity over which he presides.
The statement recalled the February 2006 Benghazi riots which killed 11 people and injured 69, saying Calderoli "is seen as the real killer of the Libyans who were killed" in the riots.
More than 50 Italian companies operate in Libya, including oil giant Eni. Libya also supplies some 30 percent of Italy's natural gas requirements.
But outgoing Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D'Alema rebuffed Gaddafi's warning on Saturday.
"The formation and the composition of the new government is an internal question, governed by precise constitutional mechanisms," said D'Alema in a statement. |
