Pan Am Flight 103

• 1. Introduction

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  At 18:58 on the 21st of December 1988, the captain of Pan Am Flight 103 made a routine call to Scottish air traffic control. He said, "Good evening, Scottish. Clipper 103. We are level at 310." The controller answered, "103, you are identified." Within five minutes, the Boeing 747 he was flying was breaking apart over Scotland. No distress call was ever recorded.

  This documentary follows Pan Am Flight 103 from the sky above Scotland to the laboratories, courtrooms and negotiating tables that came after. It asks who built the bomb and who placed it aboard. It asks what was said in the weeks before the flight about an attack on Pan Am, and who heard it. And it asks whether the only man ever convicted was truly responsible, a question that some relatives of the dead and some legal observers pressed for years.

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• 2. Clipper Maid of the Seas

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  The 15th Boeing 747 ever built first flew on the 25th of January 1970. Pan Am took delivery on the 15th of February, one month after the airline put its first 747 into service. Until 1979 the jet carried the name Clipper Morning Light, and later it became Clipper Maid of the Seas. In 1978, under its earlier name, it appeared in "Conquering the Atlantic," the fourth episode of the BBC documentary series Diamonds in the Sky, presented by Julian Pettifer.

  Two earlier 747 losses had also involved explosives. Pan Am Flight 93 was blown up on the ground in 1970 during the Dawson's Field hijackings, the first hull loss of a 747. In June 1985, Air India 182 was destroyed by a bomb in mid-air. That made Pan Am 103 the second 747 lost to a mid-air bombing.

  On the day of the disaster, the journey began at Frankfurt Airport in West Germany. Passengers boarded a Boeing 727 flying under the number PA103-A. Pan Am and Trans World Airlines routinely changed aircraft types between legs of a trip. Tickets could be booked from Frankfurt to New York or from Frankfurt to Detroit, with a change of aircraft at London's Heathrow Airport.

  At Heathrow Terminal 3, the passengers and their luggage were moved directly to the 747. The luggage included an unaccompanied suitcase that had travelled as interline baggage on the feeder flight. The jet itself had arrived from Los Angeles via San Francisco as flight PA 124, landing at noon and parking at Gate K-14. It pushed back from the terminal at 18:04 and took off from runway 27R at 18:25, bound for New York's JFK Airport and then Detroit. Many popular accounts describe a late departure. In fact the flight, scheduled to leave its gate at 18:00, left on time.

  After the disaster, the flight number was changed, in line with standard airline practice. The route through Frankfurt, London, New York and Detroit then ran as Pan Am Flight 3 until the company's demise in 1991.

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• 3. Breakup Over Lockerbie

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  At 19:02 UTC the jet crossed the coast at the Solway Firth, level at 31000 ft with the transponder code 0357 showing on the radar scope. Later analysis put its ground speed at 803 km/h. At 19:02:44, airways controller Alan Topp at the Scottish Air Traffic Control Centre transmitted the oceanic route clearance on behalf of Shanwick. Nobody on the aircraft acknowledged it.

  The transponder signal then flickered off just northeast of the village of Kettleholm, and controllers got no answer to their calls. The cockpit voice recorder had logged a loud noise at 19:02:50. On radar, a single echo became five, fanning outward. Eight seconds after the blast, the wreckage already stretched across one nautical mile. A British Airways pilot flying the London to Glasgow shuttle near Carlisle radioed that he could see a huge fire on the ground.

  The bomb tore a 50 cm hole in the left side of the fuselage. Within the first few seconds, the walls and roof of the upper deck ripped away. Investigators from the US Federal Aviation Administration concluded that nobody in the cockpit had started any emergency procedure. Police searchers found the cockpit voice recorder, which sat in the tail, in a field within 24 hours. It held no distress call, only a hissing sound lasting 180 milliseconds as the blast destroyed the aircraft's communications center.

  The explosion in the hold was magnified by a sudden loss of cabin pressure. The elevator and rudder control cables were severed, and the fuselage pitched downward and to the left. Investigators from Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch concluded that the nose broke away within three seconds. A band of metal held it for a moment, facing backward like the lid of a can. Then it sheared off, up and back toward the right, striking the number-three engine on its way.

  The rest of the fuselage kept moving forward and down until it reached 19000 ft, where its dive became nearly vertical. Violent flutter disintegrated the vertical stabilizer, which produced large yawing movements. Flying debris then tore off both horizontal stabilizers, while the rear fuselage, the three remaining engines and the fin torque box came apart. The rear fuselage, parts of the baggage hold and three landing gear units fell on Rosebank Crescent.

  The central wing structure came down on Sherwood Crescent and exploded, destroying three homes and leaving a large crater. About 200000 lb of jet fuel ignited and burned several more houses. Investigators noted that almost no wing debris was found away from the crater, which confirmed that the whole wing box had struck there. The British Geological Survey at Eskdalemuir, 23 km away, recorded a seismic event of 1.6 magnitude at 19:03:36, which it attributed to the impact.

  The forward fuselage, with the flight deck and nose landing gear, lay in one piece in a field about 4 km east of Lockerbie, opposite Tundergarth Church. It had landed almost flat on its left side with a slight nose-down tilt. This is the wreckage most closely tied to the images the media carried around the world.

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• 4. Lives Lost

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  Of the 270 people killed, 190 were American citizens and 43 were British. The dead included 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 residents of Lockerbie. Nineteen other nationalities were represented, with no more than four passengers from any one country. Seventeen bodies were never found: ten passengers, who were six Americans, three Hungarians and one Canadian, and seven Lockerbie residents. They were presumed to have been vaporized by the fireball at the impact crater.

  Captain James B. MacQuarrie, 55, had flown for Pan Am since 1964 and logged almost 11,000 flight hours, more than 4,000 of them in 747s. Earlier he served three years in the US Navy and five years in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, where he held the rank of major. First Officer Raymond R. Wagner, 52, joined Pan Am in 1966 and had nearly 12,000 hours in total, almost 5,500 of them on the 747. He had spent eight years in the New Jersey National Guard.

  Flight Engineer Jerry D. Avritt, 46, came to Pan Am in 1980 after 13 years with National Airlines. He had more than 8,000 flying hours, nearly 500 of them in the 747. The cockpit crew was based at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The 13 cabin crew members were based at Heathrow, and six of them had become naturalized US citizens while working for Pan Am. Their seniority ranged from nine months to 28 years.

  The captain, the first officer, the flight engineer, a flight attendant and several first-class passengers were found still strapped into their seats inside the nose section. A local woman found one flight attendant alive, but she died before help could be summoned. A pathologist's report concluded that at least two passengers might have survived had they received medical attention in time.

  Thirty-five of the passengers were Syracuse University students returning home for Christmas after a semester at the university's London and European campuses. They belonged to an overseas program then called the Division of International Programs Abroad, which was renamed Syracuse University Abroad in 2006. Ten of the 35 came from other colleges with ties to Syracuse, including Colgate University and the University of Colorado. Several were due to connect at JFK to Pan Am Express Flight 4919 to Syracuse. The rear fuselage, where many of them sat, destroyed a house at 71 Park Place in Lockerbie. Its owner, Ella Ramsden, survived. The bodies of two of the students were never recovered.

  Other passengers were prominent. Bernt Carlsson, 50, the UN Commissioner for Namibia, had been due at the signing of the New York Accords at UN headquarters the next day. James Fuller, chief executive of Volkswagen of America, was returning from a meeting with executives in Germany, together with marketing director Lou Marengo. Irish Olympic sailor Peter Dix was aboard, as were rock musician Paul Jeffreys and his wife.

  Two Diplomatic Security Service special agents, Daniel Emmett O'Connor and Ronald Albert Lariviere, were on the flight. So was Matthew Gannon, the CIA's deputy station chief in Beirut, who sat in seat 14J in the Clipper Class cabin. A group of US intelligence specialists was also aboard. Their presence gave rise to speculation that one or more of them had been the target.

  On Sherwood Crescent, 11 residents died when the wing section struck the house at number 13 at more than 800 km/h and exploded. The blast left a crater 47 m long with a volume of 560 m3. Both occupants of number 13 were killed, and their bodies were never found. A family of four died when the house at number 15 exploded. A couple and their daughter died at number 16, while their son watched a fireball engulf the house from a neighbor's garage, where he had been repairing his sister's bicycle. Two widows aged 82 and 81, who also lived on the street, were the oldest victims. A further 21 houses were damaged beyond repair.

  Patrick Keegans, recently appointed Catholic parish priest of Lockerbie, was preparing to visit friends with his mother around 19:00. His house at 1 Sherwood Crescent was the only one on the street neither destroyed by the impact nor gutted by fire. He had gone upstairs to make sure he had hidden his mother's Christmas present. Speaking to the BBC in 2018, he recalled, "Immediately after that, there was an enormous explosion." The shaking stopped, and to his surprise he was uninjured. His mother was unharmed too, shielded from debris by a refrigerator-freezer.

  Relatives, most of them from the United States, arrived within days to identify the dead. Volunteers from Lockerbie ran canteens that stayed open around the clock, offering free sandwiches, hot meals, drinks and counseling to relatives, soldiers, police officers and social workers. Townspeople washed, dried and ironed every item of clothing that police had cleared of forensic value, so that as much as possible could be returned to families. On the tenth anniversary, the BBC's Scotland correspondent Andrew Cassell reported that the town had "opened their homes and hearts" to the relatives, bearing its own losses "stoically and with enormous dignity."

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• 5. Warnings and Suspects

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  On the 5th of December 1988, sixteen days before the bombing, a man with an Arabic accent telephoned the US Embassy in Helsinki, Finland. He said a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States would be blown up within two weeks by someone linked to the Palestinian militant Abu Nidal Organization. A Finnish woman, he said, would carry the bomb aboard as an unwitting courier. The US Federal Aviation Administration issued a security bulletin the same day, and the State Department cabled it to dozens of embassies.

  The FAA sent the bulletin to every US carrier, Pan Am among them. Pan Am had charged each passenger a $5 security surcharge and promised screening of passengers, staff, airport facilities, baggage and aircraft with "unrelenting thoroughness." Yet the security team in Frankfurt found the warning under a pile of papers on a desk the day after the bombing. One Frankfurt screener, whose job was to spot explosives on X-ray, told ABC News that she first learned what Semtex was during her interview, eleven months after the attack.

  A second alert came just days before the flight. European security forces, including those in the UK, were put on watch after the Palestine Liberation Organization warned that extremists might launch attacks to undermine its ongoing dialogue with the United States.

  On the day of the bombing, Britain's MI6 told its French counterpart, the Directorate-General for External Security, that the UK suspected the Libyans. Meanwhile, claims of responsibility poured in by telephone in the United States and Europe. According to a CIA analysis dated the 22nd of December 1988, a male caller said a group called the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution had destroyed the plane to avenge Iran Air Flight 655, shot down by US forces in the Persian Gulf the previous July. A caller claiming to speak for the Islamic Jihad Organization told ABC News the group had planted the bomb to mark Christmas. Another caller blamed the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad.

  The analysts judged the Guardians' claim the most credible so far. Even so, they wrote, "We cannot assign responsibility for this tragedy to any terrorist group at this time." They expected, as often happens, that many groups would seek credit.

  The original prime suspect was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, a Syria-based group led by Ahmed Jibril. One of the warnings that flooded in before the disaster read: "team of Palestinians not associated with PLO intends to attack US targets in Europe. Time frame is present. Targets specified are Pan Am Airlines and US military bases." Five weeks before that warning, Jibril's right-hand man, Haffez Dalkamoni, had been arrested in Frankfurt with a known bomb-maker, Marwen Khreesat.

  US intelligence officials later confirmed that members of the group had been watching Pan Am's facilities at Frankfurt airport. A deep-cover CIA agent was told by up to 15 high-level Syrian officials that the group was involved. In 2014, an Iranian ex-spy asserted that Iran had ordered the attack. The Iranian foreign ministry swiftly denied any involvement.

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• 6. Wreckage and Witnesses

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  Debris from the aircraft lay across 2000 km2, and investigators from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch faced a vast jigsaw puzzle. Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary opened the search with helicopter surveys, satellite imaging and ground sweeps by police and soldiers. More than 10,000 pieces of debris were retrieved, tagged and entered into a computer tracking system. The perpetrators had apparently meant the plane to fall into the sea and take any traceable evidence with it. Because it exploded over land, it left a trail instead.

  Reconstruction of the fuselage revealed a hole of about 20 inches, consistent with an explosion in the forward cargo hold. The baggage container nearest the hole was blackened, pitted and badly damaged, which pointed to what investigators called a "high-energy event" inside it. A series of test explosions then confirmed the location and quantity of the explosive.

  Fragments of a Samsonite suitcase, believed to have held the bomb, were recovered. So were pieces of circuit board from a Toshiba "Bombeat" RT-SF16 radio cassette player. West German police had seized a similar player, hiding a Semtex bomb, from the PFLP-GC two months earlier. Baby clothing found among the debris was thought to come from the same suitcase and was later proven to have been made in Malta.

  The clothes led investigators to a Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, who became a key prosecution witness. He testified that he sold the clothes to a man of Libyan appearance. Across 23 interviews, his accounts of the buyer's identity, age and appearance, and of the date of purchase, contradicted one another. He later identified Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

  Megrahi had been in Malta only on the 7th of December, so that date was assumed to be the day of sale. The date is in doubt. Gauci had testified that Malta's Christmas lights were not yet on when he sold the clothes, yet the lights were later found to have been switched on by the 6th of December. Scottish police also failed to tell the defense that another witness had seen Libyan men making a similar purchase on a different day.

  An official report, not available to the defense at trial, said that on the 19th of April 1999, four days before Gauci first identified Megrahi, he had seen Megrahi's photograph in a magazine linking him to the bombing. In court, Gauci was asked whether the man was present. He answered, "He is the man on this side. He resembles him a lot."

  A second strand of evidence was a circuit board fragment, allegedly found embedded in charred material. It was identified as part of an electronic timer similar to one found on a Libyan intelligence agent arrested ten months earlier while carrying materials for a Semtex bomb. The timer was allegedly traced through its Swiss maker, Mebo, to the Libyan military, and Mebo employee Ulrich Lumpert identified the fragment at trial.

  Mebo's owner, Edwin Bollier, told the court that police had first shown him a fragment of a brown eight-ply board from a prototype timer never supplied to Libya. The sample he was asked to identify at trial was a green nine-ply board of a kind Mebo had indeed supplied to Libya. Bollier wanted to pursue the discrepancy, but trial judge Lord Sutherland told him he could not. Bollier also claimed that in 1991 he declined an offer of US$4 million from the FBI in return for backing the main line of inquiry.

  Scotland's Lord Advocate described the case as the UK's largest criminal inquiry, led by the smallest police force in Britain. During a three-year joint investigation with the US FBI, 15,000 witness statements were taken. On the 13th of November 1991, murder indictments were issued against two Libyans. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was a Libyan intelligence officer and head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines. Lamin Khalifah Fhimah was the airline's station manager at Luqa Airport in Malta.

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• 7. Trial and Release

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  On the 5th of April 1999, the two accused were handed to Scottish police at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, a neutral venue chosen for the trial. United Nations sanctions and protracted negotiations with Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, had finally secured the handover. The trial began on the 3rd of May 2000, and neither defendant chose to give evidence.

  On the 31st of January 2001, a panel of three Scottish judges convicted Megrahi of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Fhimah was acquitted. The judges said the evidence on the clothing, the purchaser and the timer, taken together with an unaccompanied bag moved from one feeder flight to another, made the inference of a Malta start "irresistible." They admitted that the lack of an explanation for how the suitcase entered the system at Luqa was "a major difficulty for the Crown case." They concluded that the plot was of Libyan origin.

  The appeal opened on the 23rd of January 2002 before five judges. Lord Cullen had allowed the BBC to televise it and stream it online with a simultaneous Arabic translation, which was described as a milestone in Scottish legal history. Defense counsel William Taylor QC argued that the trial judges had missed the relevance of "significant" evidence and had accepted unreliable facts. He also offered fresh evidence that the bomb began its journey at Heathrow. In the two hours before 00:35 on the 21st of December 1988, a padlock on a secure airside door in Terminal 3 had been forced, near the baggage build-up area.

  On the 14th of March 2002, Lord Cullen took under three minutes to reject the appeal. The five judges ruled unanimously that "none of the grounds of appeal was well-founded." The next day, a helicopter flew Megrahi from Camp Zeist to Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow. His application to the European Court of Human Rights was declared inadmissible in July 2003.

  Hans Köchler, an international observer appointed by the UN Secretary-General, published reports in February 2001 and March 2002. He called the decisions of the trial and appeal courts a "spectacular miscarriage of justice." On the 23rd of September 2003, Megrahi applied to the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission. On the 28th of June 2007, after an 800-page report, the commission referred the case back to the High Court because he "may have suffered a miscarriage of justice." Köchler criticized the commission for clearing police, prosecutors and forensic staff. "No officials to be blamed, simply a Maltese shopkeeper," he told The Herald.

  The second appeal hit procedural snags. Defense counsel Maggie Scott QC sought documents shown to the prosecution but not to the defense before trial, apparently concerning the Mebo timer. She also sought papers on an alleged payment of $2 million to Gauci. The appeal began on the 28th of April 2009 and was adjourned after a month. Illness among the judges pushed later sessions into 2010. Scott warned, "There is a very serious danger that my client will die before the case is determined."

  On the 25th of July 2009, Megrahi applied for compassionate release. On the 12th of August 2009, he dropped his appeal, and he was freed on the 20th of August 2009 because of terminal prostate cancer. A chartered jet carried him to Libya. His survival well beyond the approximate three-month prognosis caused controversy. After release he published evidence online that he said would clear his name. Allegations were made that the UK government and BP wanted him freed as part of a trade deal with Libya.

  In August 2011, during Libya's upheaval, his whereabouts were briefly unknown, until the Scottish government and East Renfrewshire Council confirmed contact with his family. CNN's Nic Robertson described him as "just a shell of the man he once was." Libya's new justice minister, Mohammed al-Alagi, said Megrahi had already been judged once and would not be judged again. Megrahi died of prostate cancer in Libya on the 20th of May 2012, the only person ever convicted of the attack.

  In October 2015, Scottish prosecutors said they wanted to interview two Libyans identified as new suspects. On the 21st of December 2020, the thirty-second anniversary of the disaster, the US attorney general announced charges against Abu Agila Mohammad Mas'ud Kheir Al-Marimi, accusing him of helping to construct the bomb. According to The New York Times, he was born in Tunisia in 1951 and began working with bombs for Libyan intelligence in 1973, at age 22, staying for 38 years. The United States took him into custody on the 11th of December 2022. Two Libyan parliamentary committee heads, Talal al-Mihoub and Youssef al-Aqouri, denounced the extradition as a violation of national sovereignty. Mas'ud pleaded not guilty in 2023, and a federal trial was set for 2026.

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• 8. Blame and Remembrance

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  On the 29th of May 2002, Libya offered up to US$2.7 billion to settle the claims of the families of the 270 dead, a figure of US$10 million per family. The offer was staged: 40 percent when UN sanctions were canceled, another 40 percent when US trade sanctions were lifted, and the final 20 percent when Libya came off the US list of states sponsoring terrorism. The UN also required a denunciation of terrorism and acceptance of responsibility for the actions of Libyan officials.

  On the 15th of August 2003, Libya's UN ambassador, Ahmed Own, sent the Security Council a letter accepting responsibility for the actions of its officials. Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem nonetheless rejected claims of responsibility for the bombing itself, saying the payments were meant to "buy peace." In a BBC Radio 4 interview on the 24th of February 2004, he called the compensation a "price for peace." Libya paid US$8 million to each family, with legal fees of about US$2.5 million deducted. The UN canceled its suspended sanctions, and US trade sanctions were lifted.

  In April 2005, with Libya still on the terrorism list, the Libyan Central Bank pulled the remaining US$540 million out of the Swiss escrow account. The US removed Libya from the list on the 15th of May 2006 and announced it would resume full diplomatic relations. In a BBC interview in 2008, Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam said Libya had admitted responsibility only to get sanctions removed, and he described the families as greedy. Several families refused payment because they believed Libya was not responsible.

  A US federal court had found Pan Am guilty of willful misconduct in 1992. The airline had failed to carry out baggage reconciliation, a security program mandated by the FAA before the bombing, which required unaccompanied luggage to be searched by hand. It relied instead on the weaker method of X-ray screening. Two Pan Am subsidiaries were also found guilty. A civil action on behalf of Pan Am, which went bankrupt partly as a result of the attack, and its insurers continued until the 18th of February 2005. They sought US$4.5 billion from Libya.

  The motive usually attributed to Libya grew out of clashes with the US Navy in the Gulf of Sidra during the 1980s. In 1981, US F-14 Tomcats shot down two Libyan fighters, and in March 1986 Libyan vessels were sunk. The US blamed Gaddafi for the April 1986 bombing of La Belle, a West Berlin nightclub frequented by US soldiers, which killed three people and injured 230. On the 15th of April 1986, US warplanes struck Tripoli and Benghazi in Operation El Dorado Canyon, the first US military strikes launched from Britain since World War II.

  In February 2011, during the Libyan Civil War, former Justice Minister Mustafa Abdul Jalil told the Swedish newspaper Expressen that Gaddafi had personally ordered the bombing. He said he held documents proving it and would hand them to the international criminal court. In a 2021 interview, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi said his father had stopped riding his horse after the humiliation of the 1986 American bombing of Tripoli and resumed riding it after the Lockerbie bombing.

  Alternative theories have circulated for years, many drawing on a 1995 investigation by journalists Paul Foot and John Ashton. One suggests the bomb was detonated by radio. Another claims the CIA stopped the suitcase from being searched. Some theories involve East German Stasi agents, apartheid South Africa or Iran. A US Defense Intelligence Agency document claimed Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur paid US$10 million for the bombing. French journalist Pierre Péan accused FBI explosives expert Thomas Thurman of fabricating evidence against Libya. No charges or official accusations were ever filed against Iran. Relatives including Jim Swire believe the bomb was planted at Heathrow, possibly by a PFLP-GC sleeper cell, and did not arrive from Malta.

  In October 1989 the US appointed Ann McLaughlin Korologos to lead a commission on aviation security. Before it reported, its members met British relatives at the US embassy in London on the 12th of February 1990. One of them, Martin Cadman, alleged that a member of the president's staff told him, "Your government and ours know exactly what happened but they are never going to tell."

  Calls for an independent inquiry grew after Megrahi dropped his appeal. On the 24th of August 2009, Jim Swire wrote to Prime Minister Gordon Brown asking for one. On the 24th of October 2009, a delegation of relatives led by Pamela Dix delivered a letter to 10 Downing Street. A petition asking Malta to table a UN resolution was signed by 20 people, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu. On the 1st of November 2009, Brown ruled out a public inquiry. The Scottish Government said it lacked the constitutional power to examine the international dimensions of the case.

  Memorials keep the victims in view. Sculptor Suse Lowenstein, whose 21-year-old son Alexander died on the flight, made a work of 43 nude statues of wives and mothers who lost a husband or child, each holding a personal memento. On the 3rd of November 1995, President Bill Clinton dedicated a memorial cairn at Arlington National Cemetery. Syracuse University holds an annual Remembrance Week and awards 35 Remembrance Scholarships, one for each student killed. It also funds tuition for two Lockerbie Academy students each year. Every the 21st of December, a service in its chapel at 14:03 marks the moment the bomb detonated over Scotland, at 19:03 UTC.

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