When Pan Am Flight 103 set off from Heathrow to New York, its passengers and crew were looking forward to returning home to celebrate Christmas – but tragically, they never made it
The Lockerbie bombing where 270 people sadly lost their lives is still the deadliest terror attack in the history of the UK, even though it took place more than 30 yeas ago. It was 21 December, 1988, when the Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York exploded just 38 minutes into its flight while travelling over Lockerbie, with the wreckage of the plain raining down on the houses below.
And it wasn’t just the passengers who lost their lives – the small Scottish town lost 11 residents, including a family of four, Jack and Rosalind Somerville and their children, Paul, 12, and Lindsay, 10, who died when a section of the aircraft fell on their home in Sherwood Crescent.
In Lockerbie, residents opened their front doors to see 259 bodies dropping out of the sky, landing on the street in front of them. After the bomb exploded, everything went dark and eerily quiet in the town.
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The 243 passengers boarding their pre-Christmas flight at London Heathrow or via Frankfurt in Germany came from 21 countries and ranged in age from two months old to 82. Forty per cent of the 270 total victims were aged 25 or younger, many of them children, while two-thirds were American.
Of the 16 crew onboard the plane, called ‘Clipper Maid of the Seas’, some were returning home to spend the festive season with their families, while others were set to enjoy some last-minute Christmas shopping in New York. They included senior purser Mary Murphy, who hailed from Twickenham and had been flying for over 25 years, and junior purser Milutin Velimirovitch, who had kindly rearranged his schedule to help a friend.
The ill-fated plane heading for New York had landed at noon at London Heathrow that day from Los Angeles, parking at Gate K-14 before pushing back for its flight at 6.04pm and taking off from runway 27R at 6.25pm. Just after 7pm, an air traffic controller at the Scottish Air Traffic Control Centre tried to make contact with the plane to no avail, before a loud noise was heard on its cockpit voice recorder.
Bunty Galloway told The Guardian she had been watching TV just like any other night when she heard a strange noise and opened her front door to see two young women fall in front of her house, with the body of a child already lying at the foot of her steps.
The bomb had exploded at 7.03pm, when the plane was 31,000 ft above Lockerbie. Radar showed that eight minutes after the explosion, the plane’s wreckage had spread to one nautical mile, with a British Airways pilot flying from Glasgow to Carlisle contacting the Scottish authorities after seeing a huge fire on the ground.
Investigators later found signs of an explosion on one of the baggage containers from the forward hold. Scottish police and FBI agents would learn the bomb, containing 350 to 450 of Semtex, had been concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player inside a brown Samsonite suitcase, which also contained various items of clothing purchased in Malta.
Records in Frankfurt suggested an unaccompanied bag had been routed from a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it had been loaded onto the feeder flight to London and onto the subsequent ill-fated flight to New York. After a painstaking investigation in 2001, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was found guilty of 270 counts of murder in connection with the bombing and sentenced to life in prison. He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 and died from prostrate cancer in 2011, always denying his involvement in the bombing.
In December 2020, the US Attorney General announced new charges against Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, a former Libyan intelligence operative, for his role in the bombing, with a trial set to take place in Washington in May.
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth premieres on Sky and NOW today