|
Britain marks 20th anniversary of Lockerbie bombing
2008-12-21
LONDON (AFP) - Britain marked the 20th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing Sunday, recalling the night a US-bound jet was blown up over a quiet Scottish town, killing 270 people. Memorial services were scheduled from 1400 GMT in Lockerbie, a close-knit community of some 4,000 people, which saw 259 passengers and crew killed and 11 more dead on the ground as flaming debris from the plane crushed homes. Relatives of those who were killed were expected to attend a service at London's Heathrow Airport, where Pan Am Flight 103 took off on the night of December 21, 1988, mostly carrying Americans home for Christmas. Ceremonies were also to take place in the United States, including at Syracuse University in New York State. A total of 35 Syracuse students coming home after studying in London and Florence, Italy, were killed on board the flight. Barely 40 minutes into the flight to New York, the Boeing 747 was ripped apart by a bomb in the luggage hold at an altitude of 9,400 metres (31,000 feet), killing everyone on board. Lockerbie residents recall the explosion turning the sky orange and wreckage , fuel and bodies raining down. The town had unwittingly been caught up in international terror. The tortuous investigation into the bombing eventually led to the jailing for 27 years of a former Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet Al-Megrahi. He is serving his sentence in a Scottish prison and, now suffering from cancer, recently failed in an attempt to be released. Al-Megrahi continues to protest his innocence and an appeal against his conviction will be heard next year. The bombing killed 180 Americans and plunged ties between Libya and the West into a chill which has only recently thawed. Libya may have been welcomed back into the international fold, but some Lockerbie residents continue to be haunted by memories of the night the jet crashed from the skies on to a town decked out in Christmas decorations. "It was the nearest thing to hell I ever want to see," said retired police inspector George Stobbs, 74, who had just returned home when he saw a television newsflash. Heading to nearby Sherwood Crescent, where the 11 residents perished, he recalled: "There was this great crater, a great mass of burning. The heat was intense. I saw an iron gate melting as if someone was putting a blow torch on to butter." Maxwell Kerr, 72, remembers finding poignant reminders of the passengers. "It was families going home at Christmas. We did find lots of Christmas presents lying scattered about. There was men, women, children and babies. It's horrific when you think about it," he said. The link to Libya was uncovered by investigators who painstakingly traced material from the Samsonite suitcase in which the explosives were planted inside a radio-cassette player. They found that the bomb had probably been placed on board in Frankfurt, from a non-Pan Am flight which connected with the doomed aircraft at Heathrow. In fact, Flight 103 was late taking off -- if it had been on schedule it would have been over the Atlantic when the bomb detonated, sparing the town of Lockerbie and probably leaving the plane's remains at the bottom of the ocean. Al-Megrahi and co-accused Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah were eventually tracked down in an international manhunt by Scottish police and the CIA, although it took years of diplomatic wrangling to put them on trial. An extraordinary court was set up in the Netherlands and Al-Megrahi was tried and convicted by Scottish judges, while Fhimah was acquitted.
| 
