The meeting had required months of delicate negotiations to secure and Shan Khan knew that he would have to tread carefully. But when the Scottish-Asian playwright had finished with the polite questions, he simply had to take the risk.

Faced with Saif el-Islam Gadaffi, the son of the Libyan leader, how could he not ask about his country’s role in the Lockerbie bombing? “We had gone through all these niceties, but what we wanted to know was what he thought about the West regarding his father as a dictator and a terrorist,” says Khan. “So I asked him.”

The gasps were audible, but the interview did not end there, as Khan feared. For the acclaimed playwright had a rather unusual interest in the answers. He is writing a new work for English National Opera about the life of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, one of the most vilified world leaders of recent times.

There has been an explosion of biographical musicals about fairly innocuous, if iconic, figures from Jerry Springer to Rod Stewart. Gadaffi the Opera marks something of a departure for the genre, as well as representing a radical shift for the world-renowned company.

Khan, who won a Verity Bargate award for his stage play The Office, which premiered at the Edinburgh festival in 2001, has been commissioned to write the libretto. Asian Dub Foundation have been drafted in to compose the music and Antonia Bird, whose work includes The Hamburg Cell, the television film that sought to humanise the terrorists behind the September 11 attacks, will direct.

A film version will be led by the director, writer and composer Mike Figgis, whose previous work includes Leaving Las Vegas.

The opera looks set to cause controversy, so Khan is conducting his research meticulously, even if that means asking awkward questions of Gadaffi’s son. “I told him, ‘I’m writing this. It’s going to have to address the question of how the West regards your father as a terrorist’.” But instead of an extreme reaction, Gadaffi simply replied: “All world leaders are terrorists then.”

But what about Yvonne Fletcher, the policewoman on duty outside the Libyan embassy during a demonstration against Gadaffi by Libyan dissidents in 1984, who was killed by a gunman inside the building? Over the years, the reluctance of his regime to admit responsibility for Fletcher’s death has caused huge offence in Britain, though now Gadaffi admits Libya’s responsibility. “Do you know what he said? ‘I am ashamed.’ And you could tell he really was,” says Khan.

The writer then turned to Lockerbie. Would Gadaffi admit to Libya’s involvement in the 1988 bombing of PanAm flight 103, which was blown up over the town, killing 270 people? The country’s stance has been ambiguous. Though it has never accepted blame, and refused to apologise, the United Nations lifted its embargo in September 2003 after Tripoli agreed to pay £1.4 billion in compensation — £2.14m for each family of the Lockerbie victims.Khan says: “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘We did not do this’.”

And does Khan believe him? “I just don’t know. But I had to ask.” He has not written the Lockerbie bombing into the storyline yet, “and that’s what everyone asks about, so I better make a decision about how to handle it”. But he is determined to get behind the facts and examine Gadaffi’s motivations.

Conscious of the danger of producing a work that would encourage the belief that many Muslims are ambivalent towards terror, Gadaffi the Opera will attempt to unpick the story of a man willing to go to any lengths to get noticed on a world stage.

“(Gadaffi) was a nutter, but I think he saw himself kind of in the same way I see myself,” says the playwright.

As a Scottish Asian from a small Lanarkshire mining town, Khan has always felt the need to work that much harder at getting noticed. The barriers have made him all the more determined to “make it”.

Times Recommends

• 5 Christmas romance confessions
• Has champagne lost its sparkle?
• Your tailor-made Christmas