Following the 21 December 1988 Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie and Libya's refusal to surrender the two suspects to a Scottish court, UN Security Council Resolution 748 (1992) imposed a comprehensive ban on all civil aviation flights into and out of Libya. By 1997 Libya was a pariah state and Sani Abacha's Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth following the 10 November 1995 execution of the Ogoni Nine. The two governments converged in mutual diplomatic isolation.
On 9 May 1997, Gaddafi's official Ilyushin Il-76, in defiance of the UN flight ban, landed at Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport. The United States Government formally demanded that Nigeria detain the aircraft under UNSCR 748; Abacha's Government instead conferred on Gaddafi the Libyan Order of Al-Fatih (Libya's highest civilian honour) at a ceremony at Government House, Kano, the same evening. The Office of the UN Secretary-General publicly censured the visit on 10 May; the United Kingdom and the United States recalled their Lagos ambassadors for consultations. Gaddafi departed the following morning. The visit deepened Nigeria's international isolation in the final year of the Abacha regime and was repeatedly cited in the 1998 EU and US sanctions packages against the regime.