Pan Am Flight 103’s final moments earlier than Lockerbie catastrophe – loud bang and falling our bodies
The Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York exploded just 38 minutes into its journey over Lockerbie, killing 270 people in the deadliest terror attack in UK history
The Lockerbie bombing, the deadliest terror attack in UK history, was a tragedy beyond comprehension. On 21 December, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York exploded just 38 minutes into its journey over Lockerbie, claiming the lives of 270 people.
The small Scottish town lost 11 residents as debris from the plane rained down, including the Somerville family – Jack and Rosalind, and their children, Paul, 12, and Lindsay, 10, who perished when a section of the aircraft fell on their Sherwood Crescent home. The transatlantic flight was part of a Frankfurt–London–New York–Detroit route, with passengers and luggage from Frankfurt transferred directly onto the Boeing 747-100 plane.
The 243 passengers, hailing from 21 countries and aged between two months and 82 years, boarded their pre-Christmas flight at London Heathrow or via Frankfurt in Germany. Some 40% of the victims were 25 or younger, many of them children, and two-thirds were American.
Among the 16 crew members on the ‘Clipper Maid of the Seas’ were those looking forward to spending the festive season with their families and others planning some last-minute Christmas shopping in New York. This included senior purser Mary Murphy from Twickenham, a veteran flyer of over 25 years, and junior purser Milutin Velimirovitch, who had kindly rearranged his schedule to help a friend.
The doomed plane bound for New York had touched down at London Heathrow from Los Angeles at midday, docking at Gate K-14 before preparing for its 6.04pm departure and lifting off from runway 27R at 6.25pm.
Just past 7pm, an air traffic controller at the Scottish Air Traffic Control Centre attempted to communicate with the aircraft but was met with silence, followed by a loud noise picked up on the cockpit voice recorder, reports the Mirror.
In Lockerbie, locals opened their front doors to a horrifying sight – 259 bodies plummeting from the sky, landing on their streets. Some victims appeared to be asleep, others were beyond recognition.
After the bomb detonated, the town was plunged into darkness and an unsettling silence. Bunty Galloway recounted to The Guardian how she had been watching TV like any other evening when she heard an unusual sound and opened her door to see two young women fall in front of her house, with a child’s body already lying at her doorstep.
The bomb had exploded at 7.03pm, when the plane was cruising at 31,000 ft above Lockerbie. Radar data revealed that eight minutes post-explosion, the plane’s debris had scattered over one nautical mile, with a British Airways pilot en route from Glasgow to Carlisle alerting Scottish authorities after spotting a massive fire on the ground.
Investigators later discovered evidence of an explosion in one of the luggage containers from the forward hold. It was revealed by Scottish police and FBI agents that the bomb, packed with 350 to 450 grams of Semtex, had been hidden inside a Toshiba radio cassette player within a brown Samsonite suitcase.
This suitcase also held various clothing items bought in Malta. Frankfurt records indicated an unaccompanied bag had been transferred from a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was loaded onto a connecting flight to London and then onto the doomed New York-bound flight.
After a meticulous investigation in 2001, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of 270 counts of murder related to the bombing and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 and died from prostate cancer in 2011, always denying his involvement in the bombing.
In December 2020, the US Attorney General announced fresh charges against Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, a former Libyan intelligence operative, for his part in the bombing, with a trial scheduled to take place in Washington in May of this year.
If convicted, Mas’ud faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
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