Lockerbie bombing: The ultimate detective story?

Thirty-five years ago this week the deadliest terror attack in British history took place when Pan Am flight 103 from London to New York exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

Short presentational grey line
In a prison cell in the United States, 72-year-old Abu Agila Masud is waiting to stand trial, accused of making the bomb that destroyed the US airliner.

The prospect of the Libyan’s trial has been accompanied by a renewed surge of interest in the events of 21 December 1988.

At its heart lies an atrocity which killed 270 men, women and children from 21 countries. Entire families died on the plane and on the ground.
An account of the investigation that followed reads like the ultimate true crime detective story.

Everyone on board Pan Am Flight 103 that night was killed; 259 passengers and crew. The oldest was 82, the youngest was a two-month-old baby.

Two thirds of the victims were Americans. It was the worst terror attack on the US until 9/11.

Another 11 people perished when the wreckage fell on their homes in Lockerbie. In total, 44 UK citizens were killed. It remains the worst act of mass murder in British legal history.
There will always be competing theories about who was responsible but only one version of events has been accepted by a court of law and upheld on appeal.

In 2001, a Scottish court sitting in the neutral Netherlands ruled it was an act of state-sponsored terrorism carried out by the Libyan intelligence service.

Three judges decided Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was part of the plot and convicted him of playing a central role in the bombing.

He became known as “the Lockerbie bomber” but he was always accused of acting along with other Libyan conspirators, including Abu Agila Masud, the man now facing trial in the US.

The case put before that court more than 20 years ago followed an international investigation that extended to 70 countries.

Almost every piece of key evidence has been debated and disputed, to the exasperation of the Scots and Americans who investigated Lockerbie.

Responding to accusations that Libya and Megrahi were framed, a former chief constable of Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary once declared: “You couldn’t make this up. How on earth can you set up a chain of evidence like that? It’s nonsense.”

The story of that chain of evidence starts in the streets of Lockerbie and the surrounding countryside.
The Boeing 747 Maid of the Seas broke up at 31,000 feet as it flew from Heathrow to New York, four days before Christmas.

Approximately 319 tons of wreckage were scattered over 845 square miles – the largest crime scene in history.

A town that would normally have four police officers on duty found itself at the centre of a massive recovery operation and investigation.

By the morning of 22 December, about 1,100 police officers were involved, along with 1,000 personnel from the military, emergency services, local authorities and voluntary groups.

In the weeks that followed, a painstaking search recovered wreckage as far away as the coast of Northumberland on the other side of the country.

Investigators found signs of an explosion on one of the baggage containers from the forward hold.

Scottish police and FBI agents established the bomb had been concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player in a Samsonsite suitcase.
Initially, suspicion fell on Iran and a Syrian-backed Palestinian militant group.

On 3 July 1988, a US Navy cruiser USS Vincennes had mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner over the Gulf, killing all 290 men, women and children on board. Iran swore revenge.

Three months before the Lockerbie bombing, in an operation titled Autumn Leaves, West German police had raided flats in Frankfurt and arrested members of the Syrian-backed Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC).

The group had been preparing bombs in radio cassette players. By December 1988, most had been released.

The feeder flight for Pam Am 103, Pan Am 103a, had left from Frankfurt.

Months were spent investigating the PFLP-GC group but the search for evidence then took the inquiry in a different direction – to an island in the Mediterranean.
By BBC