OhOn December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, and 11 others died when the wreckage fell on their homes. Scottish police and FBI agents discovered a bomb was hidden in a Toshiba radio cassette player, placed in a Samsonite suitcase. To date, the Lockerbie attack remains the deadliest terrorist attack in the United Kingdom.
The Lockerbie bombing – and the controversial legal proceedings that followed – are the subject of a new miniseries on Peacock, premiering January 2 and titled Lockerbie: a search for the truth. Adapted from the 2021 non-fiction book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Quest for Justice by Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph, the five-episode miniseries stars Colin Firth as Swire, a doctor who dedicates his life to uncovering the truth about the bombing that killed his daughter Flora (played by Rosanna Adams), who was flying to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Lockerbie story and Swire’s subsequent detective work is how difficult it has been for the victims’ families to get answers. Even when British and American authorities claimed the bombing was an act of state terrorism carried out by Libyan intelligence services and a trial was held in 2001, Swire remained skeptical, revealing to whom wanted to hear the flaws in the prosecution’s case. . Even today, there are many alternative theories about who was responsible and their motivations.
Let’s break down the real story behind Lockerbie: a search for the truth and examine the many alternative theories of history.
What happened in the Lockerbie bombing?
Flight 103, a Boeing 747, was scheduled to connect Frankfurt to Detroit with stopovers in London and New York. Shortly after 7 p.m., as the plane flew over Scotland, it was destroyed. There were no survivors. A total of 270 people died, including the flight’s passengers, crew and 11 residents.
How did the investigation go?
Police Scotland and the FBI carried out a three-year joint investigation. In November 1991, they issued arrest warrants for two Libyan nationals, including Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, on trial at the Scottish court at Camp Zeist, a former US air base, in the Netherlands. They were also accused of placing the suitcase containing the bomb into the baggage system in the Maltese town of Luqa for a flight from Malta to Frankfurt and then on to London.
Both men proclaimed their innocence. Then-Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi refused to extradite al-Megrahi and his compatriot Lamin Khalifa Fhimah to authorities in Washington or Edinburgh, leading to years of sanctions. Ultimately, Nelson Mandela and the United Nations negotiated a deal that led to the Camp Zeist trial.
The main piece of evidence used by prosecutors was a piece of cloth found near the countryside, 30 miles from Lockerbie, after the accident. Tucked into the neckband of a burned shirt was a fragment of a circuit board that the CIA and FBI believed matched a component of an MST-13 bomb timer. A similar timer was seized in Togo and attributed to a Swiss company called MEBO. The company revealed to investigators that it had sold MST-13 timers to Libya and one of the company’s owners, Edwin Bollier, admitted that he knew al-Megrahi, who he said had an office next to his in Zurich.
Meanwhile, investigators traced the piece of clothing to a small store in Malta. Store owner Tony Gauci told investigators he remembered selling a seemingly random selection of clothing to a man in the weeks before the bombing. When shown a photo of al-Megrahi, Gauci said it looked like the man in his store. Al-Megrahi denied having been in Malta that day, although immigration records show that al-Megrahi had arrived on the island from Libya on December 20, 1988, the day before the attack, in using a false passport.
Al-Megrahi reportedly returned to Libya on the 21stst with fellow intelligence agent Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud, who was later accused of making the bomb used on Flight 103. (Mas’ud was indicted by the United States in 2020 for the bombing of the bomb and arrested in December 2022. He pleaded not guilty in (February 2023 and a trial was set for May 2025 in Washington.) Al-Megrahi refused to appear during his trial, so the public never heard his explanation as to why he was allegedly arrested in Malta or why he used a fake ID.
In 2001, al-Megrahi was convicted of 270 counts of murder in connection with the bombing and sentenced to life in prison. He was released by the Scottish Government in 2009 on humanitarian grounds after being diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. Al-Megrahi died in 2012 and was the only person convicted for the attack. Al-Megrahi’s co-accused, Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, was found not guilty and acquitted.
Before his death, Megrahi regularly proclaimed his innocence; he unsuccessfully appealed his 2001 conviction. Ultimately, al-Megrahi abandoned his appeal two days before his release.
On August 29, 2011, the Wall Street Journal published an article about a private letter written by Megrahi to intelligence headquarters in Tripoli, Libya. Addressed to the country’s intelligence chief, Abdallah al-Senussi, the letter declared: “I am an innocent man.”
Gaddafi, who was assassinated by rebel forces in 2011, never accepted personal responsibility for the attack, but in 2003 his government took responsibility “for the actions of its officials” and agreed to pay 2, 7 billion dollars in compensation to the families of the victims of the attack.
Who is Jim Swire?
After the death of his daughter Flora on Flight 103, Swire dedicated his life to discovering the truth about who carried out the Lockerbie bombing and what their motives were. (Today, Swire is 80 years old and runs the website lockerbietruth.com with Peter Biddulph, co-author of Lockerbie: A Search for the Truth.) A spokesperson for UK Families Flight 103, a group of family members of the deceased, Swire also argued for a retrial and the release of al-Megrahi (since deceased), who he said had been unfairly accused of the bombing.
In a controversial display of lax airport security, Swire carried a fake bomb on a British Airways flight from London to New York and then to Boston in 1990.
As he wrote in his book, Swire believes the bomb’s timer fragment was planted. “In 2012 came the surprising news that independent scientific tests carried out by two British scientists proved that the timer fragment did not come from a timer board made by Swiss manufacturers… This conclusively meant that the fragment could not not come from a timer card supplied to Libya,” Swire writes in a book summary on his website.
Swire also repeatedly told reporters that he believed Iran was primarily responsible for the Lockerbie attack; The United States did not follow this theory because officials wanted to “blame someone, anyone, rather than Iran.”
What are the other theories and revelations surrounding the Lockerbie attack?
According to a 1991 fact sheet released by the U.S. State Department, officials initially believed the attack was a joint plan between Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC). The fact sheet describes “reliable intelligence” indicating that these groups were planning to attack a U.S. target in retaliation for an incident in which the U.S. warship USS Vincennes accidentally shot down an Iranian Airbus in July 1988, just five months before Lockerbie.
Likewise, the bomb that exploded on Flight 103 resembled one, also in a Toshiba radio, found in a Palestinian activist’s car during a raid in Frankfurt less than two months earlier. The PFLP-GC would also have been in possession of the flight schedules.
Investigators did not pursue this theory further, as the State Department said the Toshiba radios were different in appearance and used different bomb technology than Flight 103. However, in 2014, an Iranian defector to Germany claimed the attack was ordered by Iran. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomheini will “copy exactly what happened to the Iranian Airbus” shot down by the United States.
In 2013, Swire told the Telegraph that he believed pursuing the Iranian theory would have caused diplomatic problems for the United States at a time when the government was negotiating the release of hostages in Lebanon.
Experts have also speculated that Syria may have been involved, as Libya, Iran and Palestinian extremists all had ties to Syria at the time. The State Department fact sheet said Syria was the primary political sponsor of the PFLP-GC and was “at least broadly aware” of the group’s operations.
“We cannot rule out a broader conspiracy between Libya and other governments or terrorist organizations,” the fact sheet said. “Despite these links, we lack information indicating direct collaboration. »
In addition to exploring Iranian-Palestinian theory, Lockerbie: a search for the truth explores the fact that there were unheeded warnings about the coming attack. In the weeks before the explosion, the U.S. Embassy in Finland received a call warning of a “plot against a Pan-American flight to the United States in the next two weeks.” The information was passed to the United States Federal Aviation Administration, but was dismissed as a hoax.
Similarly, two days before the flight, the British Department of Transport sent Pan Am a letter warning that a bomb had been placed in a cassette player. The warning was based on information sent by German intelligence services. Pan Am later said that due to the Christmas rush the letter was not received until January 17.
Finally, in his first appeal in 2002, Megrahi’s defense pointed to evidence suggesting that the Samsonite suitcase did not come from Malta, including reports of a security breach at Heathrow 18 hours before the attack. The appeals panel rejected this argument as grounds for a new trial.
Where is the Lockerbie affair today?
After more than 35 years, al-Megrahi remains the only person convicted of the bombing, while the trial date for alleged co-conspirator Mas’ud is currently set for May 12, 2025.
Yet many questions and theories continue to swirl around all aspects of the Lockerbie bombing. Lockerbie: a search for the truth does not answer these questions directly, as it provides a step-by-step account of Swire’s investigation and introduces a new generation of audiences to a dark piece of geopolitical history.
