The miniseries Lockerbie: Attack on the Pan Am Flight will be released on Sky from 27 January, starring Colin Firth as the father of one of the victims of the most serious terrorist attack in the history of the United Kingdom. Younger people may never have heard of this tragic event that occurred in 1988, even though the related trials continue to this day; but even for those who were there and have some memory, a brief review of the true story of the attack on Pan Am flight 103, which crashed near the Scottish town of Lockerbie, causing the death of all 270 people on board and of 11 residents.
The accident
Pan Am Flight 103 departed from Frankfurt, Germany, and had Detroit as its final destination, after a stopover in London and New York. Although it was a single flight (even if tickets could also be purchased for just the London-New York route) it was common practice in London for passengers already on board to be transferred to another aircraft, and this also happened on 21 December 1988.
The Clipper Maid of the Sea plane, a Boeing 747, took off from Heathrow shortly after 6pm, headed north and at 7.01pm requested authorization to turn towards the Atlantic to take the route towards New York: that was the the last communication came from that aircraft, which exploded two minutes late in flight due to a bomb hidden in a suitcase containing a cassette recorder and 400 g of explosives inside plastic. The bomb blew a half-metre hole in the fuselage of the plane, causing the front part with the cockpit to separate and then the wreckage of the plane to crash, which swept away dozens of houses in Lockerbie causing the death of 11 inhabitants of the town.
The unheard alarms
There were two alarm bells which however remained substantially unheeded by the British authorities. On December 5, a man with an Arabic accent called the US embassy to say that within two weeks there would be an explosion on a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to Detroit, due to a bomb unknowingly carried by a woman Finnish.
A few days later, a similar warning came from the Palestine Liberation Organization, which warned of a possible attack by extremists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to undermine the ongoing dialogue between the PLO and the USA. In both cases, the British and European authorities did not give much weight to the warnings, intensifying controls only for a few days.
The end of Pan Am
The American airline Pan Am was already in trouble following the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 in Pakistan two years earlier. With this disaster the company’s conditions worsened further, and in 1991 it closed the business.
The only culprit convicted
The investigations led rather quickly to determining how the attack had occurred. Two arrests made in the previous months in Germany provided further insights to the investigators, who followed the trail that led to identifying the culprits in Libya.
In particular, the culprit was identified as Abd el-Basset Ali al-Megrahi, Libyan intelligence officer and head of security for Libyan Airways. After the UN sanctions on Libya, Colonel Gaddafi decided in 1999 to hand over al-Megrahi and one of his alleged accomplices to the GIS Carabinieri, who then handed them over to the Scottish Police.
Abd el-Basset Ali al-Megrahi was sentenced to life imprisonment, and to date he is the only official culprit in the affair, but in 2009 he was released from prison, officially only due to a serious form of prostate cancer, but probably also due to an agreement between Libya and the United Kingdom. However, al-Megrahi died in 2012.
Gaddafi compensated the families of the victims with a billion dollars, although he denied until his death that he had given the order to carry out the attack. Over the years, numerous theories have been put forward to explain the attack – from Iran to the Stasi. In particular, Jim Swire, father of one of the victims, wrote the book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, in which he claimed that the bomb would have been introduced into the plane at Heathrow (Pan Am security had not monitored the plane, the night before) from a sleeper cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Sky series was inspired by Swire’s book.
In 2020, the US accused Tunisian-born Libyan soldier Abu Agila Masud of participating in the attack. Captured in 2022, his trial is expected to begin this year, 2025. 37 years later, the Lockerbie bombing is still a case to be solved.