Pan Am Flight 103 Bombing

On December 21, 1988, Pan American World Airways Flight 103 from London to New York exploded 31,000 feet above the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. The crash provoked one of the longest criminal investigations in Scottish history, and led to an eight-year diplomatic game of cat and mouse in which the United Nations imposed sanctions on Libya.

Just after 7 p.m. that December night, the Boeing 747 crash-landed onto the little Scottish town, destroying 21 houses in Lockerbie. The youngest person killed in the explosion was just two months old, while the oldest was 82 years of age. All 259 passengers, hailing from 21 nations, were killed, along with 11 people on the ground; 189 of those killed were American citizens.

The bombing took place four months after an Iranian Airbus was shot down by the American military cruiser Vincennes. Iranian government officials and Middle East terrorist groups had issued threats of revenge in wake of the July 1988 Airbus disaster, in which 290 people were killed. U.S. officials originally suspected that Iran had paid the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command to carry out the bombing. The organization denied any involvement in the crime.

The Scottish investigation, which lasted three years, would later point to different culprits. Investigators sifted through 4 million pieces of wreckage, scattered throughout 845 square miles of countryside, and cataloged more than 15,000 items of personal effects. A one-pound Semtex bomb placed inside a Toshiba radio-cassette recorder was found to have caused the disaster. The bomb was inside a brown Samsonite suitcase in the plane's cargo hold. Investigators traced the owner of every piece of luggage on board the flight, except for the brown suitcase.

Computer records at the Frankfort airport in West Germany, where the flight originated, showed that the brown Samsonite suitcase traveled aboard Pan Am Flight 103 without an accompanying passenger. Investigators determined that the luggage had been transferred from an Air Malta flight that had recently arrived in Frankfort from Malta's Luqa airport.

Abdel Basset Ali al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah both worked for the state-owned Libyan Arab Airlines at the time of the disaster. Megrahi worked as an operations manager, while Fhimah held the position of security manager. The Libyan Arab Airlines and Air Malta desks were located side by side, and they shared luggage loading belts. Inside the brown suitcase that housed the Semtex bomb, investigators also found articles of clothing that were traced to a Malta shop. In a piece of much-contested evidence, the shop owner told investigators that he remembered selling the clothes to a man who resembled Megrahi.

The United States and Scotland issued an indictment in 1991 charging Megrahi and Fhimah, both Libyan nationals, with the bombing of Pan Am 103. French officials also announced that the two men were suspects in the 1989 bombing of a French jet over Niger that killed 171 people. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and Libyan officials refused to hand the two over to stand trial, however, arguing that the men would not be treated fairly in a trial in either Scotland or America. This refusal led the United Nations (UN) in April 1992 to adopt resolutions calling for sanctions prohibiting military sales to Libya and banning airline traffic from taking off or landing in Libya. The UN increased the severity of the sanctions in November 1993, freezing Libya's overseas assets and forbidding the sale of oil equipment to the country.

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