Remembering the impact of the tragedy on Scotland and the events that followed.
On the morning of 22 December 1988, police officers arrived at the National Library of Scotland's Causewayside Building.
They had been referred to the Library by Ordnance Survey Scotland in order to procure copies of the latest 1:10,000 maps of Dumfriesshire.
The previous evening, Pan-Am flight 103 took off from Heathrow Airport, bound for New York. Thirty-seven minutes later, having risen to 31,000 feet above the Solway Firth and travelling at just under 500 miles per hour, the Boeing 747-121 named 'Clipper Maid of the Seas' exploded, plummeting 16 crew and 243 passengers, baggage, fuel and wreckage over the countryside of Southern Scotland. There were no survivors.
The television news that night reported eye witness accounts of a fireball in the sky. A British Airways pilot, flying the London to Glasgow shuttle over Carlisle reported a huge fire on the ground. Initial reports linked this to an explosion at a petrol station, but the fire he saw was in the town of Lockerbie, where the bulk of the fuselage and the wings containing around 200,000 pounds of fuel had obliterated the houses on Sherwood Crescent, killing 11 residents. Such was the ferocity of the explosion that six of the bodies were never recovered. The ensuing fireball rose above the town and across the A74 road scorching cars and prompting local residents to fear a meltdown at the nearby Chapelcross Power Station. The wreckage was eventually strewn over 2,000 square kilometres of Scottish countryside.
Later that evening and the following day — in a world without internet or widespread mobile phones — television and newspaper reports from Lockerbie provided pictures of the extent of the explosion, albeit censoring some of the more harrowing images. The carnage was described variously as akin to a war zone, like an image from Dante's 'Inferno', or a Dresden-like maelstrom. 'The Scotsman' headline read: 'A town laid waste.' The nose of the aircraft with the blue and white Pan-Am livery buried near Tundergarth Parish Church featured in several newspapers. Other images were too distressing to publish.
stricken townsfolk provided support to the emergency services
As police sped from the National Library down the A74, their colleagues were undertaking the grisly task of locating, tagging and identifying bodies and body parts before mapping their location and then transporting them by helicopter to the temporary mortuary set up at Lockerbie's ice rink. Those killed included 190 American citizens, 35 of whom attended Syracuse University, 43 from the UK, and 19 other nationalities. Emergency services had arrived quickly, and rudimentary incident and command rooms had been established in the town hall and the local academy, bringing some degree of organization to the chaos.
As the scale of the tragedy became apparent, the stricken townsfolk provided support to the emergency services, many through simple acts of humanity: school dinner ladies feeding soldiers, police officers and social workers; an elderly woman covering a dead boy's body with a warm blanket; washing, drying and ironing clothing for return to victims' relatives, and providing compassionate ears to the bereaved and distressed.
In commemorating the tragedy in 2018 the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, referred to some of the enduring ties and friendships that arose out of the tragedy, and spoke of the compassion, dignity and resilience of the victims' families and the people of Lockerbie.
The investigation of the crash site and the reconstruction of the aircraft by the staff from the Department of Transport's Air Accident Investigation Branch and other investigators confirmed that Pan-Am 103 had been brought down by a Semtex bomb located within a Toshiba radio-cassette inside a Samsonite suitcase. The suitcase was located inside a baggage pod and close to the fuselage. It punctured a 20-inch hole which led to uncontrolled decompression, destruction of the communications centre and disintegration of the aircraft.
There had also been warnings prior to the fatal flight of a planned attack by the Abu Nidal Organization, which were distributed by the US State Department and the Federal Aviation Administration to embassies and US carriers but to no avail.
A number of groups claimed responsibility for the bomb though initial suspicion fell upon a group called the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution possibly working at the behest of the Iranian Government in an act of retaliation. The Iranian Government had issued a call of 'qisas', judicial revenge, against the United States after the USS Vincennes under the command of Captain Will Rogers III, had fired a surface-to-air missile at Iran flight 655 on 3 July, bringing down the aircraft over the Strait of Hormuz and killing 290 people. Rogers had apparently mistaken the climbing commercial airbus for an Iranian Air Force F-14 Tomcat descending in attack profile. The USA denied legal liability and offered no apology, but later compensated the Iranian families of the victims.
[the inquiry] took three years, during which 15,000 witness statements were taken
Suspicion was also focused on the Libyan regime led by Colonel Muammer Gaddafi, possibly motivated by military confrontations with USA forces in 1981 and 1986 in the Gulf of Sidra. The Libyan regime had also been accused of ordering a retaliatory bombing of a Berlin nightclub in 1986, used by USA military personnel, and the hijacking of the New York-bound Pan-Am flight 73 in Karachi in the same year. The suspicions gathered momentum when it was discovered that clothing from the suspect suitcase had been purchased from a Maltese merchant, Tony Gauci, by a man of suspected Libyan nationality. It was alleged that the suitcase was flown from Malta to Frankfurt on flight KM 180 where it was then loaded onto a feeder flight for Pan-Am 103.
The inquiry into the Lockerbie Air disaster was conducted by the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, the UK's smallest police force, and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. It took three years, during which 15,000 witness statements were taken. It resulted in indictments for murder issued on 13 November 1991 to two Libyan nationals, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah. After prolonged negotiations and UN sanctions, Colonel Gaddafi agreed to the two men being tried (and later, in a letter to the United Nations Security Council accepted responsibility for the actions of Libyan officials). The trial before three Scottish judges was held by a specially convened Scottish Court at a disused USA Air Force base called Camp Zeist near Utrecht in the Netherlands. It began on 3 May 2000, with the verdicts announced on 31 January 2001. Megrahi was the only person convicted.
There were doubts about the soundness of the conviction, however. The United Nations observer, Hans Kochler criticised the trial and the judgment, and Lockerbie-born lawyer Robert Black, often referred to as the architect of the trial, has spoken about an egregious miscarriage of justice and damage to the reputation of the Scottish criminal justice system. Megrahi's subsequent appeal against the conviction, broadcast live on the internet, was dismissed after a 14-day hearing. A second appeal was withdrawn after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. In August 2009 he was released on compassionate grounds from prison in Greenock by the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill. MacAskill's 2016 book 'The Lockerbie bombing' alleges that he was under pressure from the UK Government to release Megrahi under a Prisoner Transfer Arrangement agreed with Libya, to help facilitate British oil drilling interests.
Megrahi died in Libya in 2012, his life extended by a drug that was not available to cancer patients in Scotland. John Ashton's book 'Megrahi: You are my jury', published in the same year, argued his case for appeal, and a 'Justice for Megrahi' group — including the author James Robertson and Dr Jim Swire, the father of one of the victims — continues to campaign against his conviction.
Questions about the trial and conviction, fabrication of evidence, the conduct of the investigation and the role of the US Criminal Intelligence Bureau rumble on, as do allegations of political expediency and strategic interests overriding justice. Articles by writers such as the late Paul Foot, and books such as Douglas Boyd's 'Lockerbie: The truth' provide alternative perspectives on the tragedy. A protracted Police Scotland Investigation — Operation Sandwood — which examined allegations made by the Justice for Megrahi Group, concluded in November 2018 that there was no evidence of criminality in the handling of the investigation and prosecution of the Lockerbie bombing case. However, it also referred to findings relevant to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission which considers cases for appeal.
The Scottish Crown Office is still treating the Lockerbie bombing as a live criminal investigation, and was reported to be investigating the role of East German intelligence officers in the atrocity as recently as March 2019.
It is now over 30 years since the Lockerbie bombing, but the terrible events of 21 December 1988 continue to reverberate.
