Lockerbie Bombing — Pan Am Flight 103
Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in southern Scotland on 21 December 1988, killing 259 people on board and eleven on the ground. The aircraft was at 31,000 feet, thirty-eight minutes out of Heathrow and bound for New York, when about 450 grams of Semtex in a radio-cassette player in a suitcase in the forward hold detonated. The nose separated within three seconds and the aircraft broke up; a wing section carrying full fuel tanks destroyed a row of houses in Sherwood Crescent. Wreckage fell across 845 square miles. Most of the passengers were American, including thirty-five students from Syracuse University flying home for Christmas. The investigation took three years and turned on fragments: a piece of circuit board a few millimetres across found embedded in a shirt collar, traced to a batch of timers sold to Libya, and clothing traced to a shop in Malta. Two Libyans were indicted in 1991, and Libya refused to hand them over for a decade under UN sanctions. They were eventually tried in 2000 under Scots law at a neutral court in the Netherlands. Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted and the other acquitted. The conviction has been questioned repeatedly, including by the Scottish review commission, which found six grounds on which it might have been a miscarriage. Megrahi was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 with terminal cancer and lived three more years. Libya accepted responsibility and paid compensation in 2003. A second Libyan suspect was surrendered to the United States in 2022 and is awaiting trial.
- Year: 1988 CE
- Category: War
