Please list your versions of Abe, pysqlite, and SQLite. I could not produce the error using Abe latest, pysqlite-2.6.0, and libsqlite3 3.7.4-2ubuntu5.
I'm using Debian wheezy and here are versions of my libs:
Abe (from git): commit dd07123fb1b5cb6c633c08d90366b879b3cb8ce9
pysqlite - ?
libsqlite3-0 - 3.7.9-2
I didn't find pysqlite and python-sqlite isn't installed either (and it shouldn't be because it's for sqlite2). But it works anyway because of the file /usr/lib/python2.6/lib-dynload/_sqlite3.so which belongs to python2.6 package.
I've tried your command but it resulted in the same error. Installing python-pysqlite2 or python-pysqlite1.1 doesn't help either. The version of my python bindings is 1.1.8:
Python 2.7.2+ (default, Nov 30 2011, 19:22:03)
[GCC 4.6.2] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import sqlite
>>> sqlite.version
'1.1.8'
>>>