39 - Terrorism at Lockerbie - The Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103

In 1988, a routine flight took off from London Heathrow. It was the second leg of a transatlantic flight that would stop in JFK, before heading even further west, to Detroit. In fact, Flight 103 had started off in Frankfurt. But something got on the flight in the German airport that shouldn't have.

It was a brown samsonite suitcase, filled with clothing and a Toshiba cassette tape player. Inside the electronics was a pound of semtex and a timer. Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over the Scottish countryside, killing everyone aboard, 11 people on the ground, and scattering debris for miles around the countryside. But who had planted the bomb?

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Theme Music:
Quinn’s Song: The Dance Begins by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Sources:
Kenny MacAskill, The Lockerbie Bombing: The search for justice (London: Biteback Publishing, 2016) Purchase here

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103#Compassionate_release_and_controversy 

Syracuse University- Lockerbie Air Disaster Archives https://panam103.syr.edu/2008exhibit.php 

Report on the accident to Boeing 747-121, N739PA at Lockerbie, Dumfriesshire, Scotland on 21 December 10988 Air Accidents Investigation Branch (Department of Transport) 2/90 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5422f36ee5274a1317000489/2-1990_N739PA.pdf 

DIA documents: https://web.archive.org/web/20080308085805/http://www.dia.mil/publicaffairs/Foia/panam103.pdf 

"Lockerbie bomber's conviction to be reviewed” from BBC.com https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-43987079 (3 May 2018) 

Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission https://www.sccrc.co.uk/conviction 

Lucy Adams and Josh Aston, “Lockerbie Exclusive: we publish the report that could have cleared Megrahi” in The Herald Scotland https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13051748.lockerbie-exclusive-we-publish-the-report-that-could-have-cleared-megrahi/ (24 March 2012) 

Robert Black QC Lockerbie Blog: http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2015/03/sccrc-2007-megrahi-report-enters-public.html 

SCCRC report http://login.heraldscotland.com/SCCRC-Statement-of-Reasons-red.pdf 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Vincennes_(CG-49)