A retired GP has spent decades campaigning for justice for his daughter Flora who was killed in the Lockerbie bombing. The UK’s worst ever terrorist attack killed 270 people
Dr Jim Swire is the real-life inspiration behind Colin Firth’s character in a new five-part Sky series about the Lockerbie plane crash.
A total of 270 people were killed in the UK’s worst-ever terrorist attack, made up of passengers and crew on the London Heathrow flight bound for New York and residents on the ground in the small Scottish town.
Flora Swire, 23, was one of the victims onboard the ill-fated flight attacked by terrorists, leaving her father, Jim, with a lifelong quest to achieve justice for his lost daughter. Flora had been heading to the Big Apple to visit her boyfriend and her parents believe she was planning to tell them she had gained a place at Cambridge University to study medicine on Christmas Day.
Sadly, the talented student was killed just minutes into her flight on December 21, 1988, when the plane exploded 31,000ft over Lockerbie. Flora never got the chance to follow Jim into a career in medicine. Instead, the GP was left torn apart by grief.
Married to wife Jane with two other children, Jim told the Mirror in 2021 that after the crash, he had formally identified his daughter’s body in a mass morgue in an ice rink in Lockerbie. Flora was so badly injured he was only able to identify his daughter by her feet, which had a dark mole on her left big toe.
Libyan national Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the terrorist attack in 2001 and released on compassionate grounds in 2009, protesting his innocence up until his death from prostate cancer in 2012. 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.
But Jim’s investigations led him to believe the Lockerbie bombing had been ordered by Iran in retaliation for an incident in July 1988, when the American warship The Vincennes destroyed an aircraft in flight containing 290 pilgrims on their way to Mecca. The 88-year-old medic believes Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who publicly swore revenge, commissioned a Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, to take down an American plane.
He cited to the Mirror a communication sent from German police to the British government in October 1988, two months before the attack, warning that Palestinian terrorists were planning to explode a bomb on a plane heading to the US. The information came after the arrest of a Palestinian bomb maker Marwan Khreesat, who was later released by a German judge.
The GP said he also discovered a classified telex sent by the then British transport secretary James Jack to Heathrow Airport, two days before the bombing, with a photo of the type of bomb they believed would be used, hidden inside a radio cassette player to make it difficult to detect on X-ray equipment. Incredibly, the message told airport staff that if they had suspicions about any object it should be “consigned to the aircraft hold” – exactly where the Lockerbie bomb exploded.
Convinced al-Megrahi wasn’t behind his daughter’s murder, Jim even befriended her convicted murderer and visited Libya, meeting Colonel Gaddafi several times. “I was terrified,” he said. “A GP from the middle of England shaking hands with the man who was supposed to be the devil incarnate. We met in his tent in the middle of the desert.
“We were surrounded by his female bodyguards holding AK47s and as I went over to him I could hear the safety catches all clicking off. We got on and even became friends.”
Jim’s book with Peter Biddiulph, Lockerbie: A Father’s Search for Justice, is the inspiration behind the new series starring Colin Firth. The actor visited the doctor and Flora’s mother Jane in his preparation for the show, saying of his interest in the role: “It was less the legal investigation or thriller element of it and far more how it made me feel, seeing this representation of Jim and Jane and their family and their journey of having carried this for so long and still carrying it.”
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is available on Sky and NOW
