what has this got to do with the UK?

The disappeared imam certainly bridged a section of history in life which still poses as many questions as his death. & I reckon the whole story has loads to do with the UK then & in the future.

You could start by wondering who he was -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musa_al-Sadr
However, I reckon that page is not enough to see the importance of raising his name from the lost dead now, 30 years on - say rather than 10 or 20.

Or maybe just look at who is being indicted : the household name Colonel Muammar Abu al-Gaddafi who went from writing his little "green book" guide to one of the forms of arabic quasi socialism to being a bigtime enemy of the West, sponsor of terror, supplier to the IRA of many arms & high quality surface to air missiles  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_IRA_arms_importation#Libyan_Arms , responsible for Lockerbie, provoked the first US bomb strike from a UK base since WW2 in which his daughter died - - - - - - - to friend of both Berlusconi and Sarkozy and ally in the war on Islamic fundamentalism in the orbit of Al Qaeda in both theoretical fronts and logistic and intelligence monitoring of Sub Saharan Africa. A bit of a survivor is old dog Gaddafi & it aint just coz people spell his name differently every few years.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_al-Gaddafi

Or maybe look at who grassed him up.

London-based Asharq Alawsat, a Saudi-run pan-Arab daily reported on 27 August 2006 that Libya killed him, later to be clarified in the August 2008 indictment depositions that Iranian General Mansour Qadar said the head of Syrian security, Rifaat al-Asad, told the Iranian ambassador to Syria that Qaddafi was planning to kill as-Sadr. Quite a load of mixed up pan-arabic and pan-Islamic agenda in that one. & all of it sitting on top of loads of oil and gas, many wars & perhaps most importantly "loads of secrets". I reckon Gaddafi has lasted so long, not due to his women bodyguards, nor his gas, but his secrets. They are often the best insurance policies if held by multiple brokers with security clauses.

Look at the disappeared Imam again & really appreciate how he bridged time. Musa al-Sadr studied in Tehran just about the time Kermit Roosevelt Jr made history for the CIA by giving it its first covert regime change. A liberal-ish democracy was replaced by the authoritarian Shah. Kermit would then later make history by writing the first book on CIA operations by an ex-CIA agent. Then if we move from al Sadr's youth to the peak of his politics and his disappearance - we see that the Iranians with whom he bonded (the last president married his daughter) began their Islamic revolution. They had all but seized control of Iran by the time he went to Libya. Four months later the Shah left the place. Both the USA and the UK, especially the UK whose first contracts with "Persia" were then exactly 90 years old were miffed. But oddly powerless to intervene. Too many people have forgotten how the impotence emerged between Kermit and the Ayatolah.

the Iranian embassy siege of 1980 occured a little bit later and taught the Briton much about the SAS and less about the Saddam Hussein seperatists of the Iranian region of Khuzestan where indeed the British had signed one of their first oil exploration deals, oh so long before.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Embassy_Siege Indeed we may rue that the opportunity to learn about the fractitious nature of those big states like Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya etc. whose nations were really held together by the glue of blood and fear. Then the Libyan embassy siege happened in 1984, the longest siege in the Met's history because a WPC had been shot. No SAS though.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvonne_Fletcher#The_siege None of this would mean anything to most people in the UK without the all important and pivotal emotional fatwa against Salman Rushdie who in turn had "disappear". By which stage the philosopher & imam Musa al-Sadr had been missing for ten years. Suddenly the household names no longer just affected the usual terrorist suspects or airline flight or diplomatic zones of big cities - now they were on the bookshelf doing a "clash of civilisation" routine.

30 years later - the name of Musa al Sadr appears again. It is odd. very very odd.

The article's title includes the word "conscience" in its sense of remorse and desire for justice - but I see more of a tweaking in the undoubted "consciousness" which that man meant to the Shia community of Lebanon long before its leadership was associated in the west with Hezbollah.

yep it's Odd.
i reach for the perplex