Long road to Lockerbie justice

By ANDREW BUNCOMBE and MARY BRAID

LONDON - It was four days before Christmas and at 35,000ft above northwest England Captain Robin Chamberlain was piloting a British Airways evening shuttle between London and Glasgow.

Just after 7 pm local time, as he was starting his descent north of Carlisle, he noticed flashes of orange light to the east. He thought at first it was a North Sea oil rig, burning gas.

"Thirty seconds later there was a large explosion which was obviously on the ground. It looked to me like a petrol storage tank had blown up. If you imagine things that you see in films it was like that. It was like a large explosion or bomb, something of that nature."

He had in fact witnessed the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 and the loss of 270 lives when the Boeing 747 whose flight path Chamberlain was following that evening exploded over the border town of Lockerbie. People from 21 different countries died that night in 1988.

There were American servicemen based in Germany flying home with their families, young English couples flying to New York for a few days shopping, businessmen, mothers with their children, a family of three from Koto Utca in Hungary. The average age was 27.

But what all the passengers shared, whether they had started the flight in Frankfurt or else joined it at Heathrow was an ignorance that anything was untoward.

While the United States Embassy in Helsinki had on December 5 received an anonymous call warning of a planned attack on a Pan Am flight leaving Frankfurt - a warning it passed on to its European diplomatic staff - one must presume that none of the passengers or crew were aware of the deadly cargo that was stored in the hold near the cockpit.

That cargo was contained within a bronze-coloured Samsonite suitcase in which was packed a Toshiba "Bombeat" radio cassette player, clothes and an umbrella. The cassette player was not what it seemed. Contained within it was between 283-396g of Semtex and a Swiss-made electronic timing device triggered to detonate the explosive at a certain time and once the Boeing had reached a certain height.

That suitcase found its way on to the Boeing having been loaded as unaccompanied luggage on to an Air Malta feeder flight which left Valletta's Luqa Airport for Frankfurt. Then it was carried on another feeder flight to Heathrow where it was then loaded centimetres from the fuselage in the hold of the Maid of the Seas. The suitcase had travelled something of a circuitous route. But the prosecutors who brought the case argued that the explosion's origins were rooted far, far earlier. Investigators who built the case against Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah traced the chain of events as far back as 1985.

They say it was that year that the men - both said to be agents with the Libyan Intelligence Services (LIS) - bought 20 electronic timers from the Swiss company Mebo. Along with other agents they tested the equipment and developed the sort of bomb that could bring down an airliner. Two months before the Lockerbie explosion they travelled to Chad where they carried out an operation on behalf of the LIS.

By this point the two men - posing as employees of Libyan Arab Airlines - were in the final stages of the plot to bring down Flight 103. It was then that Megrahi bought the clothes and umbrella from Mary's House, a shop in Sliema, Malta. Fragments of the clothes - including a blue romper suit which bore the label 'Keep away from fire' - were later identified among the debris that was found with the cassette player.

Shopkeeper Anthony Gauci, who only gave evidence for a single day last July, was first interviewed in September 1989. He remembered the sale of clothes weeks before Christmas 1988, recalling a Libyan man in a blue suit. In court he said Megrahi resembled the man who bought the clothes.

The not guilty verdict on Fhimah cleared him of involvement, focusing attention on Megrahi. But no-one believes that Megrahi, a married father-of-four, was acting alone.

While the deal brokered by the United Nations under which they were handed over for trial by Libya ensured that no action against other Libyans would be pursued and while such a suggestion was denied by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi one must presume the two men were acting on orders.

Yesterday Gaddafi declared Megrahi innocent and welcomed home Fhimah with an embrace. He said he would reveal evidence to prove Megrahi's innocence.

Gaddafi's motive it has been argued, dates from April 1986 when American bombers, flying from bases in the United Kingdom and sent in response to the planting by a Libyan agent of a bomb in a packed Berlin discotheque used by US forces, attacked Tripoli. Gaddafi's adopted daughter Hanna was among those killed.

Given that the LIS agents were said to have bought the timers the previous year, one must also presume that part of their duties involved preparing for other attacks. If so it is of little surprise that the bomb they dispatched at Malta, knowing it would find its way on to Flight 103, would explode with such devastating effect.

Before that night in December 1988, Lockerbie was a small, quiet, nondescript town of 3000 people with little public profile.

But in those moments that evening, as many residents sat watching television the town would be changed forever. Though the explosion blew the airliner into four million pieces, scattered from the Firth of Clyde to Newcastle upon Tyne, much of its fuselage and up to 70 tonnes of aviation fuel fell on Lockerbie's Sherwood Cres. All 11 of the town's residents who were killed lived there in the quiet cul-de-sac. Many of the bodies were never recovered, having been incinerated by the intense heat.

"It's seared on my mind," said search-and-rescue dog handler, Bill Parr. "I found the girls, in the dark, in the middle of a field, strapped to their airline seats. They were wrapped in each other's arms, and their fingers were crossed."

Parr, who combed the hills around Lockerbie, on that snowy, distant winter's night, is concerned about the resurfacing of memories with the verdict.

His memories are harrowing. He entered the cockpit, less than an hour after the explosion. The only sound was the wind as the little torch, strapped to his forehead, traced the outline of the bodies of the pilot and six passengers.

"At least I expected to find bodies there," he said. He did not expect to stumble across the entwined girls in the nearby field, or the 20 other bodies lying close by. And he did not expect to find two children, one 15 months, the other three years old, lying in another field.

"There was just fire raining down," said Jasmin Bell, a social worker who was delivering Christmas presents that night as the fuselage passed above her like a shadow of "dark, grey metal."

The townswomen took in the victims' clothes, scattered over so many kilometres, and washed, ironed and folded them, before they were sent home. And when the families started pouring into town on Christmas Day, residents queued to take them, if they asked, to the spot where their relative's body was found. The people are still returning, the residents still guide.

It has been exhausting, dealing with the families of the dead. George Stobbs, Lockerbie's retired police inspector, has had to deal with Americans so distrustful of government they thought he was an agent. But no-one touched him more than the middle-aged American woman who turned up in Lockerbie, "just to be sure" her daughter was not on the plane.

Her daughter was on the passenger list, and some of her belongings had been recovered. But the woman had convinced herself her daughter had not boarded, and was wandering round Europe suffering from amnesia.

It took the inspector four and a half hours to convince the woman her child had been on the plane, sitting between the fuel tanks when the bomb exploded. For Stobbs, at least, the verdict meant something. Acting on someone else's orders, he said, does not diminish personal responsibility.

"The questions the relatives wanted answered could never be answered by the court," said community councillor Joe Meechan. "And I'll be surprised if they ever are.

One of the memorials to the dead of Lockerbie is 4.8km to the west in the hamlet of Tundergarth. It was in a field here that the plane's cockpit landed, strewn with rubbish and bodies.

A small remembrance room sits in the centre of the cemetery and on the wall, alongside a laminated plaque bearing the names of the dead, is the following inscription: "There are three things that last: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love."

- HERALD CORRESPONDENTS