December 21: On This Day in World History … briefly
The explosion occurred almost directly under the ‘P’ in ‘Pan Am’ on the other side of the fuselage.
1988: Pan American flight crashes at Lockerbie
A Pan American jumbo jet blew up and crashed in the Scottish border town of Lockerbie killing all 259 passengers on board and at least 11 people on the ground. En route from London Heathrow to New York, the jumbo disappeared from radar screens at 7.19pm as it exploded in the air, scattering wreckage over a large area.
The wing of the plane came down in a residential part of Lockerbie, destroying six houses and creating a huge crater on impact. The nose of the plane – with the dead crew still inside – was found about three miles (5km) from the town.
Dozens of fires burned in the town and the RAF were brought in to fly medical teams into Lockerbie to assist the emergency services with casualties. American embassies were warned that a Pan Am flight would be targeted. Flight 103 originated in Frankfurt and stopped at London Heathrow before departing for New York.
On December 21, 1988, N739PA, the aircraft operating the transatlantic leg of the route was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members – a disaster known as the Lockerbie bombing. Large sections of the aircraft crashed onto residential areas of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 11 people on the ground.
Following a three-year joint investigation by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), arrest warrants were issued for two Libyan nationals in November 1991. In 1999, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi handed over the two men for trial at Camp Zeist, Netherlands, after protracted negotiations and UN sanctions. In 2001, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life after being found guilty of 270 counts of murder in connection with the bombing.
In August 2009, he was released by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds after being diagnosed with prostate cancer. He died in May 2012 as the only person to be convicted for the attack. In 2003, Gaddafi accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and paid compensation to the families of the victims, although he maintained that he had never given the order for the attack.
During the Libyan Civil War in 2011, former Minister of Justice Mustafa Abdul Jalil claimed that the Libyan leader had personally ordered the bombing, though this was later denied
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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