The truth died at Lockerbie

[What follows is excerpted from a long article just published in English on the website of Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The original German language version was published on 14 June:]

Thirty-six years after the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, US prosecutors are pursuing a new case stemming from the terrorist attack. At the center of the investigation is a colorful entrepreneur from Zurich and his claims of conspiracy.

Edwin Bollier, now nearly 88 years old, sits in his office on Badenerstrasse in Zurich and says: "The book is written. All I have to do is pull it out of the drawer." In his book, Bollier finally wants to tell what he sees as the whole truth about the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which more people were killed than in any terrorist attack in Europe since. (...)

Now, at last, US prosecutors are bringing their own case relating to what President Ronald Reagan called the "attack on America." Many years ago, a mid-level intelligence agent from Libya was convicted in Scotland of being involved in the attack. However, some observers never gave up their doubts about this guilty verdict. A figure accused of being an accomplice of the convicted man is currently in custody in the United States, and a new round of legal procedures is underway.

US prosecutors in Zurich

Last year, two prosecutors and a judge traveled to Zurich to question Bollier as a witness. He is confident that the American court will follow his lead when it ultimately makes its ruling. "I have provided all the information necessary to finally expose the conspiracy," he says.

Bollier argues that it was not in fact Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence service that was behind the bombing, but rather a Syrian-Palestinian commando group acting on behalf of Iran.

Bollier says he is waiting for the US court verdict to be issued before publishing his book. However, the court handling the case recently postponed the trial date originally set for May, citing, among other factors, the "complexity" of the case.

Bollier isn’t concerned. He says he is prepared to testify whenever the trial takes place.

No one knows PT/35 (b) as well

The Zurich entrepreneur is also one of the key figures in the US court proceedings. No one is as familiar with the piece of evidence with the file number PT/35 (b) as well as he is. This exhibit is no larger than a fingernail. It is only 1 millimeter thick, and weighs less than 1 gram.

For more than 30 years, the entire Lockerbie case has hinged on this tiny piece of evidence.

It comes from an electronic circuit board, the kind of technology found in every smartphone today. A circuit board is flat, made partially out of conductive metal, and serves as the foundation on which the components necessary for an electronic device are built. The circuit board to which the fragment in question belonged before being torn out by the explosion in the Boeing 747 was part of a timer-based detonator.

Out of the huge, several-ton pile of debris that was recovered in Lockerbie, PT/35 (b) is the only piece that points to Libya. Without this tiny fragment, the Libyan intelligence agent named Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi could not have been charged.

In his office on Badenerstrasse, Bollier is poring over files. He reads them without glasses, even the small print. When he talks about Lockerbie, which he usually does almost without pause for breath, he sometimes mixes up names or dates. Then his wife Mahnaz, a native Persian who came to Switzerland after the fall of the shah, comes to his aid.

It didn't take her long to became part of Team Bollier, and today she knows the Lockerbie case's ins and outs almost as well as her husband.

The film and TV industry has also been subjecting the crash of Pan Am 103 to a thorough reexamination. Several productions have called the Scottish court ruling into question, in some cases openly postulating a miscarriage of justice. The streaming platform Sky is showing an ambitious documentary on the subject, paired with a successful dramatization of the incident as a series starring Colin Firth in the lead role. Its rival Netflix will soon follow with a program produced in collaboration with the BBC.

Too sensitive for Al Jazeera

However, the most controversial production has proved to be a multipart series created by Arab television network Al Jazeera. One episode was withdrawn after broadcast, and the last episode was not broadcast at all. Apparently, it was too controversial for the network’s Qatari owners. The NZZ has viewed all episodes of this series. It reveals previously unknown information that adds weight to suspicions that Iran was behind the attack.

Sooner or later, every documentary filmmaker addressing this subject finds their way to Badenerstrasse 414 in Zurich – that is, to Bollier's office. The BBC has sent its film crews here, as have Sky and Al Jazeera. The multistory concrete building in Zurich's Nova Park gives the feeling of having been drawn from another era. Stepping into the third-floor office with the sign "MEBO LTD," a visitor might well feel that they had been transported back to the 1970s. (...)

Explosives in a cassette recorder

On the evening of Dec 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, bound from London to New York, had just reached its cruising altitude of 9,000 meters when a bomb exploded in the cargo hold. A timer-based detonator built into a Toshiba cassette recorder had triggered the explosion. The plane crashed.

All 259 passengers and crew members, most of them US citizens on their way to their Christmas holidays, were killed. An additional 11 people at the crash site in Lockerbie also lost their lives.

The delivery to Libya

A few years previously, in 1985, Bollier's small electronics company Mebo had delivered 20 timer devices to Libya – of the same model that triggered the explosion. This delivery is a matter of record and is undisputed.

The name "Mebo" is drawn from the names of the two company founders, Erwin Meister and Edwin Bollier. While Meister has long since withdrawn from public life, Bollier is still fighting on the front lines to defend his company's reputation.

Mebo Ltd. was a simple trading company with a focus on electrical appliances. It even developed a few devices itself. This included a timer with the model number MST-13. An engineer, Mebo’s sole employee, had developed the device in a small workshop. A third-party company manufactured the MST-13 timer according to his plans.

The Libyan army was almost the sole purchaser of these timers. A few additional units were sold to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police agency.

"But we didn't supply detonators to Libya. Just electronic timers," Bollier insists in an interview in his office.

This distinction is important to him – after all, a timer is not in itself a weapon. A timer becomes a weapon only if it is connected to a detonator. Mebo did not do that, Bollier says. Libya thus must have hooked up the detonator itself.

The business owner picks up a timer that is sitting on his desk in his office. The MST-13 is about the size of a fist. It is nothing more than a simple timer, he says. "Similar to an alarm clock or an egg timer, only a bit more robust, fireproof and waterproof."

Mebo had an export license for the delivery of the timer-based switches to Libya and the East German government. The Swiss agency in charge of overseeing such exports did not find that this contract violated the country’s Federal Act on War Materiel.

Because the issue is so important to him, we have agreed with Bollier to use the English word "timer" throughout this article, even in its German-language original – referring both to timers with and without detonators attached.

And what did the Libyan army use the timers from Switzerland for? Bollier insists that the army used them as defensive weapons. The sale came during the desert war against neighboring Chad. The timers were set in military camps where capture was deemed a possibility, he says. If a squad was able to retain its position, it would defuse the explosive. However, if a camp were to be captured by the enemy, the device would go off at some point.

Bollier has never been charged with any crime in connection with the Lockerbie bombing, either as an accomplice or an accessory, even though the Scottish authorities did consider doing so. In Switzerland, the Office of the Attorney General initiated criminal proceedings, but these were discontinued after four years.

Bollier has always appeared in court only as a witness. For more than 30 years, he has been saying the same thing: that the Lockerbie discovery, exhibit PT/35 (b), that tiny fragment of bomb-wrecked timer, differs in various details from the timers that Bollier’s firm delivered to Libya.

For example, he argues that the fragment exhibits characteristics that were introduced only in 1990, more than a year after the crash of Pan Am Flight 103.

Only one conclusion can be drawn from this, says Bollier: "Someone must have placed the find at the crash site after the fact, in order to lay a false trail pointing to Libya."

Brown instead of charred

When investigators from Scotland and the US first showed him a photo of the discovery, Bollier recognized it immediately. That was in 1990. "In the photo, the fragment was brown," he recalls. "But after the explosion, it should have been charred."

When he later saw the original of the PT/35 (b) fragment, it was no longer brown – it was charred, he says. From this, Bollier concludes that the alleged find is not only a forgery, but was also tampered with after the fact.

This is clearly an outrageous accusation. But Bollier stands by it. He refers to the alleged forgers and manipulators of the only piece of conclusive evidence from Lockerbie as "Group XXX." By this he means those within Scottish and American government agencies that he says were responsible for this falsification, in cooperation with the Swiss intelligence service, which was then a part of the Federal Office of Police.

However, as someone making such a serious accusation, Bollier has a problem: His credibility is in tatters.

Someone once said that Bollier was the worst witness imaginable, thanks to his dubious past. Anyone who did business during the Cold War with the secret police and intelligence services of Libya and East Germany, with Gaddafi’s «Jamahiriya» state and the Stasi, has inevitably seen their reputation permanently damaged.

Bollier's fight for the truth, as he calls it, is therefore also a fight for his own rehabilitation. Furthermore, if the trail to Libya does indeed turn out to be falsified and manipulated, this would do more than exonerate Bollier morally – he would also be entitled to the equivalent of millions of dollars in financial compensation.

However, Edwin Bollier is not alone in his assertion that exhibit PT/35 (b) was planted at the Lockerbie crash site after the fact. Jim Swire is convinced of this as well.

Bollier’s opposite

When it comes to credibility, Swire is the opposite of Bollier. The English doctor lost his 23-year-old daughter Flora in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. With his clear independence and unimpugned integrity, he soon became a respected spokesman for the families of the British victims.

Bollier and Swire share the same view. But it is no coincidence that Colin Firth is playing the English country doctor rather than the Swiss wheeler-dealer in Sky’s dramatization of the events.

Since the crash of Pan Am 103, Swire has dedicated his life to finding his daughter’s murderers, as he consistently refers to them. At 89 years old, he still hasn't achieved his goal.

Swire once campaigned vigorously to bring Libyan defendant Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and his alleged accomplices to trial in Scotland. When, after much back and forth, that trial finally took place on neutral ground at the former Camp Zeist military base in the Netherlands, Swire did not miss a single one of the 85 days of proceedings.

Nothing would have made him happier than to know at last who had been responsible for his daughter's death. But at the end of the trial, he found himself convinced that al-Megrahi was innocent, and had nothing to do with the bombing.

Befriended the convicted attacker

On the day the verdict was announced, Swire was so distraught that he suffered a breakdown. He was shocked by al-Megrahi's conviction – along with the simultaneous acquittal of his alleged accomplice – and disappointed by the Scottish justice system.

Swire visited al-Megrahi several times in prison, and ultimately became friends with him. When the Libyan was diagnosed with cancer, Swire spoke out strongly in favor of his release. «The sooner he is released, the better,» he was quoted as saying in the NZZ am Sonntag newspaper.

When al-Megrahi was dying in 2012, Swire traveled to Tripoli amid the unrest following Gaddafi’s fall. Even on his deathbed, al-Megrahi protested his innocence.

Swire fulfilled his last wish. In his book published in 2021, the key message is that fragment PT/35 (b) cannot have come from any of the 20 timers that Bollier's Mebo had once delivered to Libya – and that al-Megrahi's conviction was therefore a miscarriage of justice.

The FBI on board

The investigation into the bombing was led by the Scottish police. However, the United States' domestic intelligence service, the FBI, was also involved from the beginning – a concession made to the US by the Scottish authorities in view of the large number of victims from America.

The unusual collaboration made the enormous investigation – featuring a debris field alone that stretched over several dozen square kilometers – even more complicated. «We weren't used to not being in the lead,» says the self-assured FBI Special Agent Richard Marquise in one of the many documentaries about Lockerbie.

However, by tapping its global network, the FBI was able to open up various sources that would have remained closed to the Scottish police. "Even the CIA supported us," Marquise once said. Given the rivalry between the two major US intelligence services, this was unusual, he noted.

Yet despite years of investigation and a huge pile of files, the case ultimately led only to the disputed conviction of the single Libyan intelligence agent.

The trail to Iran

Initially, everything pointed in a different direction. Indeed, after just a few months, the Lockerbie case seemed to have been solved, with investigators regarding it as a probable act of retaliation by Iran.

On July 3, 1988, a few months before Lockerbie, a US Navy warship shot down an Iranian passenger plane in the Persian Gulf – accidentally, according to official statements. All 290 passengers, including 66 children, were killed.

Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini publicly vowed revenge, saying that an American aircraft carrying many passengers would be shot down. There was subsequently much to suggest that the Iranian regime had commissioned a commando group from Syria known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, or PFLP-GC, to carry out the retaliatory action.

The PFLP-GC operated from Syria under the command of Ahmed Jibril. In 1970, his agents had used a parcel bomb to bring down Swissair Flight 330 over Würenlingen, killing all 47 passengers. In that instance, the explosive was built into a radio and triggered by an altimeter.

Thanks to the investigations in the Würenlingen case, hardly anyone in the West was as familiar with the PFLP-GC as the Swiss Office of the Attorney General. Six months after Lockerbie, in late May 1989, three Scottish investigators thus traveled to Bern to exchange information with their Swiss colleagues.

The secret meeting lasted two days, turning up striking parallels. The plastic explosive used in the Lockerbie bombing had been Semtex, which was manufactured in Czechoslovakia. This was the same material that had been used in Würenlingen. Even the bomb maker appeared to be the same individual, a Jordanian named Marwan Khreesat.

A few weeks before Lockerbie, in late October 1988, Khreesat had been arrested in Düsseldorf as part of a broad operation dubbed "Autumn Leaves." In total, German police arrested more than a dozen members of the PFLP-GC – dealing a serious blow to the terrorist group.

During the raid, police also seized four electronic devices, all of which had been rigged with explosives. One of these devices was a Toshiba portable radio.

It thus appeared that German police had foiled a planned series of attacks by the PFLP-GC. However, interviews with the detainees revealed that the terrorists had originally prepared five such devices, not just four.

The conclusion seemed obvious: The fifth electrical device must have been the Toshiba cassette recorder that exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.

When the Scottish delegation bid farewell to their Swiss colleagues on May 25, 1989, the case appeared to be solved. Investigators believed that the Toshiba cassette recorder containing the explosives had been loaded into the cargo hold of a Boeing 747 at Frankfurt Airport on the Pan Am 103 A feeder flight to London Heathrow.

This conclusion was stated in the minutes drawn up by the Swiss Office of the Attorney General following the meeting with their colleagues from Scotland. After a lengthy tug-of-war, the Switzerland-based Beobachter magazine published these minutes a few years ago.

But then everything changed.

The shift to Libya

No arrest warrant was issued for Khreesat, the alleged bomb maker, or for any other member of the PFLP-GC initially suspected of involvement.

Instead, the Scottish police and the FBI, who had been focusing their part of the investigation on Iran, issued arrest warrants for two previously unknown Libyans: Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and an alleged accomplice, the station manager of the Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta.

Exactly how these arrest warrants came to be issued remains unclear today. Apparently, they were based on secret information from the CIA and a somewhat shady agent in Malta.

In his office, Bollier rummages through one of the many piles that have accumulated in an adjoining room over the past decades.

He finds the newspaper article he is looking for, and offers a summary: The surprising turnaround in the investigation was the result of the geostrategic climate at the time, which was very different from today's. The United States and the United Kingdom, which at the time were at war with Iraq, did not want to spoil their relationship with Iran’s government as well.

Thus, the article argued, shifting blame for the Lockerbie bombing to Libyan leader Gaddafi and his intelligence agents proved a convenient alternative. After all, their April 1986 attack on a West Berlin discotheque frequented primarily by American soldiers had gone unpunished.

«It's that simple,» Bollier says, tossing the newspaper article back onto the pile.

It is possible that for the U.S. and the U.K., Libya was seen as a more convenient scapegoat than Iran at that point in history. However, like so much else in the Lockerbie case, this theory cannot be proven.

Gaddafi's photo on the side table

This difficulty doesn't impress Bollier. In his office on Badenerstrasse, the presence of long-deposed Libyan despot Gaddafi can still be felt everywhere. A framed photo of the young Gaddafi is placed on the side table next to the sofa, leaning against an iron palm tree.

During Gaddafi's more than 40 years in power, his regime systematically violated human rights. It engaged in countless arbitrary arrests, imprisoning and torturing opposition figures. Many of these individuals disappeared or were executed.

Bollier offers a kind of counterpoint, however. "Gaddafi may have blood on his hands," he says. But from the leader’s own point of view, he had been acting in the interests of the Libyan people, Bollier says. The entrepreneur counts off the gains: roads, housing, infrastructure – "everything in tiptop shape," he says.

It is jarring statements like this that undermine the image of Bollier as a fearless fighter for the truth.

An office for the alleged attacker

Another startling fact reveals just how close Bollier's relationship with Gaddafi's internationally ostracized regime was: Mebo temporarily rented an office at Badenerstrasse 414 to two employees of the Libyan intelligence services – one of whom was Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi.

Bollier plays this down. It was purely business, he says. And anyway, al-Megrahi visited Zurich only two or three times a year.

Bollier started doing business with Libya in the mid-1970s. Even before media pioneer Roger Schawinski shook up Switzerland's media landscape by founding his Radio 24 station – which broadcast as a pirate station from Pizzo Groppera in Italy before eventually becoming the country's first commercial radio station – the trained radio engineer Bollier had been operating his own pirate radio station in the North Sea. He had chugged around the international zone in a converted ship, competing in turn with the state broadcasters in England and the Netherlands.

"It was a lucrative business for a while," recalls Bollier – until the authorities shut the pirate station down.

$4.9 million from Gaddafi

That left Bollier sitting on an expensive ship crammed full of electronics that nobody wanted. Only one person showed any interest: Muammar Gaddafi. The Libyan ruler paid Bollier $4.9 million for the former pirate radio craft.

Nor did this prove to be the only such deal. Although Bollier says he never met Gaddafi in person, the Libyan state became the Swiss entrepreneur’s most important customer. Contracts with the military and intelligence services soon followed. In the 1980s, Bollier installed Tripoli’s first fax machines, after purchasing them first from a distributor in Zurich. "For this, the Libyans, who had never seen a fax machine before, celebrated me like a hero," he says.

The fax machines were soon followed by the delivery of the MST-13 timers to Libya.

The circumstances surrounding the discovery of the fingernail-sized fragment PT/35 (b), which is supposed to have come from one of these timers from Zurich, are striking. Scottish police found it six months after the crash, in late May 1989, in a wooded area more than 30 kilometers from the crash site. The fragment was stuck inside the collar of a Salomon-brand shirt that had originally been purchased in Malta.

That shirt had wound up in a maroon Samsonite suitcase along with the Toshiba cassette recorder that was rigged with explosives.

No pieces belonging to the timer's significantly larger and more robust housing were ever found. In some official documents, the date of discovery is given not as May 1989, but rather as January 1990 – that is, more than a year after the crash. These dates are important for Bollier's argument.

The Scottish police initially had no idea what to make of their chance discovery. They searched unsuccessfully at 54 companies across 17 countries in hopes of tracking down the origin of the PT/35 (b) fragment.

Help from the FBI and CIA

In early 1990, the Scottish police asked their colleagues at the FBI for help. These investigators then quickly found what they were looking for: The fragment was an exact match with a timer-based detonator that the CIA had seized during a raid in Togo in 1985, they said. Through some convoluted means, a Mebo MST-13 timer had apparently found its way to the rebels in Togo.

However, over the years, investigative journalists have uncovered inconsistencies in this conclusion. One such reporter is Otto Hostettler from the Switzerland-based Beobachter magazine. He has published several articles on the discrepancies in the Lockerbie case.

Like Bollier, Hostettler also concludes: "The item labeled PT/35 (b) cannot have come from the shipment to Libya that Edwin Bollier made in 1985." The fragment contains technical components that had not even been developed at that time, the reporter notes.

Moreover, in addition to Jim Swire, the representative of the victims' families, and investigative journalist Hostettler, there are still other unimpeachable figures who agree with Bollier that something is not right about PT/35 (b).

The odd role of Switzerland's intelligence service

The role played by one senior member of the Swiss Federal Office of Police, which was Switzerland's intelligence service at the time, is nothing less than striking. It is a matter of record that on June 22, 1989, six months after Lockerbie, this intelligence service agent appeared at the Badenerstrasse 414 building. On the third floor, rather than visiting the Mebo Ltd offices, he instead ended up in the workshop on the other side of the corridor. There he met with the engineer who had developed the MST-13 timer.

This is publicly known because Bollier later reported the intelligence service agent to the authorities. The entrepreneur accused this figure of stealing a timer from Mebo's inventory and passing it on to the FBI, all without a search warrant. Bollier demanded 6 million Swiss francs in damages from the intelligence service agent.

As part of the criminal proceedings, the Swiss Office of the Attorney General summarized the facts of the case in a written statement. That statement is dated July 30, 2012, and is signed by the head of the office's National Security division

According to this statement, the employee of the Federal Office of Police did indeed receive a timer from the Mebo engineer, "which he passed on to the American authorities."

"The evidence is said to have been subsequently tampered with," says the Office of the Attorney General’s written statement. Followed by: "This assertion by Bollier has not simply been pulled out of thin air."

The Attorney General’s Office explains why Bollier’s assertion could be correct as follows: "In any case, an expert opinion provided by the scientific service of the Canton of Zurich proves that the timer handed over to the Swiss federal police and the timer fragment presented as evidence by the Scottish authorities cannot be identical."

No other authority has adopted Bollier’s thesis that exhibit PT/35 (b) was falsified as clearly as the Swiss Office of the Attorney General, in this written statement.

However, the Zurich cantonal police report referred to in the Attorney General’s statement has never subsequently turned up. This is confirmed by respected Zurich lawyer Marcel Bosonnet, who represented Bollier in this case.

The Swiss Federal Supreme Court never addressed the claim for damages – Bollier had submitted it too late.

"In my opinion, there was a lack of will to get at the truth," Bosonnet says. In so doing, Switzerland missed a unique opportunity to resolve the Lockerbie case, he adds.

Al Jazeera reports on secret meetings

This clue prompted the researchers at Al Jazeera's English-language service to work even harder. Their documentary series, which has since been withdrawn, describes how, over the course of 1988, a few months before the Lockerbie crash, several meetings took place involving representatives of the intelligence services of Iran, Syria and Libya, as well as of Hezbollah and the PFLP-GC. The common goal was reportedly a militant campaign financed by Iran against targets in the US and Israel, which was to include shooting down passenger aircraft.

According to Al Jazeera's reporting, these secret meetings took place between March and October 1988 in Malta, Cyprus and Lebanon.

In the documentary, Robert Baer is given considerable time to speak. This author, a former CIA agent, has long argued that Iran, not Libya, was behind the Lockerbie attack. He has been joined by other voices from within American intelligence circles.

Baer told Al Jazeera that he had evidence showing that a few days after the attack on Pan Am 103, in late 1988, $11 million had been transferred from Iran to a bank account in Lausanne. Some of this money was later transferred to the accounts of two leading members of the PFLP-GC, he contends.

Baer is no longer employed by the CIA. Nevertheless, he is bound by the principle that anything he makes public based on knowledge gained during his time in service must be approved in advance by the CIA.

In Al Jazeera’s withdrawn documentary series, he says that he had followed this process in order to divulge his information. He additionally says that there is consensus within CIA and FBI circles that Iran was responsible for the Lockerbie crash.

So has Gaddafi's Libya been wrongly blamed, for more than 30 years, for one of Europe's most devastating terrorist attacks?

Despite the numerous proponents of this theory, the question is still not easy to answer. In fact, a new book published in early 2025 argues against this conclusion.

"Top secret" handwritten letters

In this book, the authors present previously unpublished archive material from the Gaddafi-era Libyan intelligence service. Handwritten letters marked "top secret" describe how, in October 1988, a division of the intelligence service in Tripoli carried out experiments with explosives, including detonating a suitcase.

At the time, the head of this division was Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence agent who had protested his innocence on his deathbed.

Prosecutors in the US are aware of this archive discovery. The postponement of the ongoing trial is likely to be related to efforts to verify documents that were not previously part of the record.

Meanwhile, back in Zurich, Edwin Bollier is keeping his book in his drawer, ready to publish. Mr Lockerbie, as he calls himself in his email address, is at least willing to reveal his title: "The Truth Died at Lockerbie."

Lockerbie bombing suspect's trial scheduled for 20 April 2026

[What follows is the text of a report just published on the website of the United Arab Emirates newspaper The National:]

The US judge overseeing the case of Lockerbie bombing suspect Abu Agila Mohammad Masud has set jury selection for April 20, 2026.

Judge Dabney Friedrich acknowledged the “complicated nature” and “voluminous discovery of evidence” in the case surrounding the 1988 attack that resulted in the explosion of a Pan Am flight and the deaths of 270 people in Scotland.

Mr Masud, 73, limped into court and donned headphones to listen to the status conference in Arabic. He looked straight ahead for the whole proceedings, never glancing at victims' families, who took up several rows of court seats.

He didn't appear to communicate with his court-appointed lawyer [RB: Whitney Minter] during proceedings. In 2023, Mr Masud pleaded not guilty in connection to one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in UK and US history.

Only one other person, former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, has been convicted for the bombing. After his conviction in 2001, Megrahi spent seven years in a Scottish prison, but he was eventually released on compassionate grounds and died in Libya in 2012. In 2003, Libya claimed responsibility for the attack that brought down the plane. [RB: Libya did not "claim responsibility for the attack". It accepted "responsibility for the acts of its officials": https://lockerbiecase.blogspot.com/2008/08/libyan-august-2003-acceptance-of.html]

The US government filed charges against Mr Masud in 2020, but it took more than two years to extradite him from Libya. [RB: Masud was not extradited from Libya. He was abducted from his home by a local warlord and sold to US authorities who then transferred him to the United States without either his own consent or that of the judicial authorities of Libya.] Mr Masud's health problems, lawyer changes and logistical problems have caused the trial planning to move at a snail's pace.

A court transcript seen by The National show the methodical nature of the case. At least three depositions of foreign citizens will have to take place outside the US before the trial begins, according to the court transcript.

Though specifics are not disclosed, ways of potentially dealing with Mr Masud's health problems are also discussed. His court-appointed lawyers have promised to provide updates about his medical condition to better prevent any delays.

In court on Thursday, Judge Friedrich emphasised the need to stay on schedule. “I want this to be aggressive,” she said, referring to trial planning dates and schedule preparations.

Mr Masud's lawyer told the judge that although there is “some disagreement” about the extent of his medical problems, both defence and prosecutors are on the same page about how to deal with it going forward.

All 259 people on board the Pan Am flight died in the attack and 11 people were killed on the ground by falling debris on December 21, 1988, shortly after the plane took off from London bound for New York.

Of the victims, 190 were US citizens, along with people from the UK and Argentina, India, South Africa and Spain, among others.

[A report on the BBC News website contains the following:]

Kara Weipz is the president of the US group Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 and lost her 20-year-old brother Richard Monetti on the plane.

"I'm just going to pray that it stays at 20 April," she said. "I was 15 when this happened, and I'm 52 now and among the relatives I'm considered young.

"A lot of our family members are in their seventies and eighties and unfortunately, we lose them weekly or monthly now.

"The travesty in all of this that they're not seeing the justice that they've worked 37 years to see.

"That's what concerns us the most, that this trial will come around and we'll have lost more family members." (...)

Some, but not all, of the British relatives have never accepted the verdict against Megrahi, including the Rev John Mosey, whose daughter Helga was on the plane.

"I think they're just waiting for people like me to pop our clogs and get out of the way," he said.

"I'm still pretty cynical about the whole thing. I would like to be proved wrong but I can't see it happening.

"As far as I'm concerned, who made the bomb and who put in on the plane are secondary as to who were the main criminals.

"They were the group of people who had all the warnings that this was going to happen and warned their own people but didn't warn the public."

A Libyan perspective on the overlooked side of the Lockerbie bombing

[This is the headline over a long and important article by Dr Mustafa Fetouri just published in the May 2025 edition of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. It reads as follows:]

The trial of Libyan citizen Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, 74, was due to begin in Washington, DC on May 12, but has been postponed at the request of the prosecution and defense due to Mas’ud’s health issues and the complexity of the case. He is accused of making the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103, killing 270 people over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec 21, 1988. Many observers believe if Mas’ud gets a fair trial and good defense, he will not be convicted.

KIDNAPPED AND SMUGGLED TO US CUSTODY

Septuagenarian Mas’ud has been in and out of the hospital almost 20 times since he was kidnapped and smuggled into the US in 2022. He suffers from chronicle illnesses including type one diabetes and had to undergo two operations: first for spine issues and then to amputate three gangrene-affected toes. His family told the Washington Report that they doubt he will survive the trial. The entire episode is outside of any legal framework, and Mas’ud is very unlikely to change the not guilty plea he entered when first arraigned in February 2023.

Back in 2001, two other Libyans were tried in special court in The Netherlands which ended in convicting Abdel Basset al-Megrahi and acquitting Lamin Fahima. Al-Megrahi, who died in 2012, protested his innocence until his last breath. Most observers and legal experts, including Dr Hans Köchler, the United Nations-appointed expert, believed that al-Megrahi and Libya were framed and the court in The Netherlands was neither objective nor fair.

COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT

The US accused the two Libyans of involvement in the disaster in 1991. In accordance with the 1971 Montreal Convention on Civil Aviation, the Libyan government offered to try both men in its courts and invited the US and the UK to submit their evidence; both countries rejected the idea. Libya in turn refused to hand over its citizens. The standstill continued for years. 

The Security Council adopted several resolutions calling on Libya to hand over its citizens to stand trial—not in Scotland where the crime took place but in the US. Many legal experts questioned the merits of the Security Council involvement in a purely criminal act. 

On midnight of April 15, 1992, Security Council Resolution 748 came into effect, imposing stringent restrictions on Libya including a ban on all civilian flights in and out of Libya while obliging all UN member states to close offices of Libyan Airlines, the national carrier.

That effectively isolated Libya and its people for a crime their government has always denied. In later years several pieces of evidence completely exonerated Libya from the Lockerbie disaster. 

Between 1992 and 1999, when sanctions were suspended, the UN Security Council passed three Lockerbie-related resolutions. Nonbinding resolution 731 (1992) called on Libya to hand over the two suspects. In 2003 Security Council Resolution 1506 ended all sanctions. Libya waited another year for the US to lift is own sanctions, some imposed as early as 1986.

NATION IN AGONY

The resolution was only the third time the Security Council had imposed collective punishment on an entire nation. And unlike apartheid South Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and later apartheid South Africa, Libya was sanctioned in the absence of any proof linking the government to the crime. 

While much has been written over the last 37 years about the Lockerbie crime, very little has been written about how Libya’s 4.6 million citizens (the estimated population at the time) coped with the harsh sanctions, which affected every aspect of their daily lives, including medicines and equipment for essential services. Travel became cumbersome; people had to travel overland to neighboring countries and then board flights to their final destination. Hundreds of students studying abroad, like myself, had to give up going home during school breaks either because it was too expensive or too time-consuming. To reach Tripoli, one had to fly to Tunisia’s Southern Djerba, take a boat from Malta or fly to Cairo, and then take ground transportation to Libya.

ACCUMULATING LOSSES

The Washington Report spoke to several former Libyan officials, all speaking anonymously, to put together a broader picture of how the country functioned while under almost complete sanctions and how its people went about their lives.

Precise figures of the economic impact of the sanctions are lacking either because of lack of documentation or because much of the government files were looted and destroyed during the upheavals of 2011 and the civil war that followed, again facilitated by the UN Security Council. The former deputy foreign minister estimates that Libya’s overall economic losses between 1992 and 2003 amounted to more than $100 billion.

The former deputy foreign minister said, “Libya took certain steps” to “document” the overall losses incurred because of the sanctions. Asked why not many countries came to Libya’s help, he explained that “many countries tried but could not because UN binding resolutions” are like “international law” and compliance is mandatory. He added, “behind the scenes the US, UK and France scared every country that considered helping Libya.” The three countries have veto power in the Security Council.

His colleague, another Qaddafi-era minister responsible for the Lockerbie losses file, said: “we documented all details including how many people died and were injured” as they took circuitous routes to catch flights to reach their destinations. 

The oil sector, the main source of revenue for the state, lost between $18 billion and $33 billion during that period. After Security Council Resolution 883 targeted the oil industry, the country’s production dropped from 1.4 mp/d (thousand barrels a day) to below 1.2 mp/d and the downward trend continued, hitting less than 1 mp/d in some months. The long-term effect was significant: the return to pre-sanction oil production levels entailed raising prices, which affected competitiveness.

Low oil prices and higher production cost meant less cash for the government which, in turn, affected its ability to import things like machinery, consumer goods, food and medicine. Medicine in particular was badly affected; patients continued to receive them for free, even as the cost to the government increased substantially, and certain medications became scarce. In general the healthcare system was disrupted and accumulated an estimated loss of some $92 million. Many Libyans sought treatment abroad, which requires hard currency, increasing demand for dollars and forcing the government to heavily regulate the availability of the dollar. This gave rise to the black market, where the price of the dollar was nearly 10 times that of government-controlled prices. 

The transportation sector lost some $900 million as spare parts become more expensive. Government control of hard currency affected both the agriculture and industry sectors, whose combined estimated losses totalled $10 billion. 

After the oil industry, the second most impacted sector was aviation. Many Libyan Airlines aircraft were stranded in airports around the world because they were already out of the country when the sanctions hit. It took the company decades to renew its fleet and resume normal services after the sanctions were lifted. Some sources estimate that the sector lost nearly $30 billion during the seven years of sanctions.

Increased road travel led to higher road accidents. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 deaths were recorded every year during the sanction period. Lack of spare parts, restrictions on importing new cars, crumbling roads and weaker road safety made a bad situation even worse. 

By the time sanctions were completely lifted in 2003, every economic sector in the country was in need of heavy government cash injections to revive it. On top of that, Libya had  to pay $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of the Lockerbie victims, as part of the settlement with the United States.

WILL LIBYA BE COMPENSATED?

The abduction and subsequent trial of Mas’ud has opened old wounds in Libya. Many Libyans protested what they considered the illegal incarceration of Mas’ud, accusing the Tripoli-based government of selling out after the Lockerbie case had already been settled. In 2008, and as part of the larger agreement to re-establish diplomatic relations between Libya and the US, the two countries signed a Claims Settlement Agreement, ending all claims against each other including all claims arising from the Lockerbie disaster. The agreement does not say anything about possible compensation for Libyan losses.

Many Libyans question how the UN’s highest body, the Security Council, could take aggressive measures against Libya without any hard facts. 

Will Libya one day be compensated as a victim of an unjust international system? This is beyond the purview of the Washington court and is likely to remain an open question after the current case is concluded.

Lockerbie documents: genuine or created to focus blame on Gaddafi?

[What follows is excerpted from a report by Jack Dennison-Thompson published today on the Maghrebi.org website:]

Fresh allegations accusing Libya, once again, to be the architect of the Lockerbie bombing in 1998 have arisen, with the US quick to endorse their validity.

According to the BBC, Samir Shegwara, a Libyan writer and politician, has published documents in his new book Murderer Who Must Be Saved, which contains classified documents that he claims he took from the archives of Libya’s former intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi after the collapse of Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in 2011. No one, so far, not least the Americans nor the Libyans, have validated the documents and so question marks arise over whether they are genuine or have been created by those with vested interests in keeping the blame for Lockerbie firmly with Colonel Gadaffi.

The classified documents are claimed to have been dated October 4th 1988 with the handwritten report labelled as “top secret” alongside one of the files containing the subject matter “Experiments on the use of the suitcase and testing its effectiveness.”

The report later explains that the tests were effective in avoiding X-ray scanners ideal considering the Pan Am flight did not hand check the bags on the flight but rather just X-rayed them.

The report also details an agent by the name of Aboujila Kheir – believed to be Abu Agila Masud Kheir Al-Marimi – who was involved in the tests. More details are believed to involve the “expenses” of an agent who traveled to Malta days before the attack on Pan Am 103, despite the island effectively being the international base for all of Libya’s foreign intelligence operatives.

The documents reportedly implicate Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s brother-in-law, in planning both the Lockerbie bombing and UTA Flight 772 attack. Senussi was convicted in absentia for the UTA bombing in 1999 but never served his sentence. Scottish and American prosecutors later named him as a Lockerbie suspect in 2015.

Sami Shegwara was arrested on the 20th of March after the documents he released were seen as a national security risk. His publishers have come out and stated that Mr Shegwara is facing legal proceedings over the “alleged possession of classified security documents, without legal justification.”

The strange case around this arrest is that Shegwara who is the mayor of Hay al Andalous in Tripoli has openly shown his possession of these documents since 2018.

Some believe this shows that the document must be real for the arrest to take place yet it also calls into question why it would take seven years for such documents to become of such importance.

The documents have now been described by a former FBI agent as “dynamite” and will be used to prosecute Abu Agila Mas’id Kheir Al-Marimi, known as Masud, who is accused of building the bomb for his trial in Washington.

While these new documents have surfaced and become “dynamite” evidence in the past month, the case of Lockerbie has been a whirlwind of truth and lies.

This is so much so that Nelson Mandela himself was sceptical to blame Libya.

Documents in the National Archive of the UK have shown that Nelson Mandela told the UK that it was wrong to hold Libya responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.

Mandela was acting as the intermediary for Libya and in a conversation with Tony Blair on April 30th 2001 “Mandela argued it was wrong to hold Libya legally responsible for the bombing,” the cables revealed.

Mandela believed that the UN was wrong to impose economic sanctions on Libya after Al Megrahis’s extraction to the Netherlands for trial where he was convicted controversially. (...)

The unusual actions in this case echo a familiar pattern, as the US faces accusations of violating international laws to abduct a Libyan national, fuellng suspicions regarding Libyan involvement in the Pan Am attack.

This occurred in November of 2022 Libyan militiamen captured Abu Agila Mas’ud, accused of bombing Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. US agents took custody of the suspect in a controversial midnight raid in Tripoli. The operation highlights ongoing tensions surrounding the Lockerbie terrorist attack.

After decades of silence, the Lockerbie victims’ families have erupted in a rare public challenge, casting doubt on the US justice system’s ability to deliver a truly impartial trial.

Dr Swire who leads representations for the families who have lost loved ones in the attack and who lost his daughter himself believes the US has blurred the lines of this situation even more, with a UN trial being the more just prosecution.

“There are so many loose ends that hang from this dreadful case, largely emanating from America, that I think we should remember what (former president of South Africa Nelson) Mandela said to the world and to us then, and seek a court that is free of being beholden to any nation directly involved in the atrocity itself,” Swire told BBC Radio Scotland.

Their unprecedented call for a UN-led prosecution speaks volumes about the deep-seated suspicions surrounding America’s long-standing narrative of the terrorist attack.

Whilst Libya has been at the forefront for blame over the Lockerbie bombing, there are alternative theories which suggest Libya was not at the forefront for the bombing.

Many journalists support the opposing argument, suggesting that a bomb was planted on the plane at Heathrow Airport by a Syrian terrorist cell that was paid for by Iran.

Whether this theory of the attack is true or whether Libya is involved it appears that the bombardment of blame onto Libya which has been carried for 37 years feels unjust and excessive, to say the least.

The current investigations have begun with the new documents as the Scottish detectives have now been examining the new files to verify Libyans involvement, alongside the US trials still taking place.

After three decades, the case for Lockerbie seems to have a new lease of life rather, it appears it never really lost it as it has constantly been dug up by countless finger-pointing to Libya by the US and the West with no tangible evidence sticking.

These new documents could potentially reshape the understanding of the case. However, a lingering question remains: why are files that have existed for seven years now being presented as urgent and pivotal evidence?

Lockerbie bombing’s lasting impact on a ‘normal little town’

[What follows is excerpted from a report by Libby Brooks published in today's edition of The Guardian:]

Eleven of the street’s residents died when the wing section of Pan Am 103 crashed into Sherwood Crescent with the force of a meteorite on 21 December 1988, gouging a 30ft crater on this spot. The impact was such that some bodies were never recovered.

This once anonymous street was recreated in meticulous detail for the filming of the Sky Atlantic series Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, which was first screened last month and stars the Oscar winner Colin Firth as Dr Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed when a bomb exploded on the Pan Am flight from London bound for New York.

Although the drama has been widely praised, some relatives of the 270 people who lost their lives in what remains the UK’s deadliest terrorist atrocity have questioned the need for such graphic depictions of the immediate aftermath. A spokesperson for the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 group described it as “tragedy porn” to the Hollywood news site Deadline, while closer to home a Lockerbie resident who lost her sister and brother-in-law wrote in the Annandale Herald: “I don’t need to be reminded about the terrible scene that night.”

But for a generation born after 1988, this series may be their first exposure to the tangle of legal proceedings, conspiracy theories and international controversy that has become synonymous with the name of one small town in the south of Scotland.

With a second dramatisation airing on BBC One and Netflix later this year, a new BBC Scotland documentary, and the trial of the alleged bomb-maker starting in the US in May, Lockerbie is likely to remain in the spotlight this year, willingly or otherwise.

“It’s the most normal little town in the world, with a strong community, and people are just living their lives,” says the Rev Frances Henderson, a minister at Lochmaben and Lockerbie Churches. “You don’t see the trauma until suddenly you do. It’s there, being carried and dealt with, a trauma that is part of their lives and has shaped the last decades.”

Henderson has not watched the Colin Firth series herself, “not because I object to it but because I feel I’d have to psyche myself up to it,” she says.

“I think most people feel it’s been done respectfully but neither have I heard of many watching it because it’s too real. For those who weren’t there, who may be too young to remember, it’s perhaps useful, but not for those who were there.”

The series was based on Swire’s investigations into the bombing. He and many supporters have argued consistently for the innocence of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence officer who was convicted in 2001 at a specially convened Scottish court in the Netherlands of 270 counts of murder.

Swire believes that Megrahi, who was released on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government in 2009 after a diagnosis of terminal cancer and died in 2011 in Tripoli, was framed to deflect attention from Iranian and Syrian responsibility. This is rejected as a conspiracy theory by US victims’ relatives, who felt the series misrepresented the trial and portrayed Megrahi as “an innocent man that should be empathised with”.

Swire and other UK relatives continue to demand a public inquiry into the failure to take seriously or make public warnings that an attack on a Pan Am flight was imminent, while in May another Libyan, 72-year-old Abu Agila Masud, will go on trial in Washington accused of building the bomb that brought down the flight. He denies all charges.

Colin Smyth, the Scottish Labour MSP for the region, said: “There has been so much written about the trial and various conspiracy theories, but no one has ever spoken to me about any of that as a constituent.

“People of Lockerbie didn’t choose for their town to be known for this, but they took their responsibility to the victims very seriously from the first night – like the couple who found a young man in their field and didn’t want to leave him so stood vigil until dawn, or the man who scooped up the body of a toddler and drove them into town so they weren’t left in the cold and wet.”

“For decades they have welcomed people with open arms as the families of the victims continue to visit their loved ones’ last resting place. Those relationships have sustained – you hear of relatives staying at family homes in Lockerbie even now.”

Those relationships are woven through the generations, thanks to the enduring scholarship programme between Lockerbie Academy and Syracuse University, New York, which lost 35 students in the disaster.

The official version ... is absolute nonsense

[What follows is excerpted from a report published in The Sunday Times today:]

The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie remains the deadliest terrorist attack to have taken place in Britain. (...)

In all 270 people were murdered, among them Flora, the 23-year-old daughter of Dr Jim and Jane Swire. For Jim it was the start of a 35-year quest to find out who had killed her and why — a story that is being told in a five-part Sky drama starring Colin Firth as Swire.

A three-year investigation by the FBI and Scottish police led to the arrest of two Libyan men, one of whom, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted of the attack in 2001. But after his trial it was revealed that the US government had paid millions to two central witnesses and some forensic evidence was discredited. Megrahi maintained his innocence until his death in 2012.

“An awful lot has been written about the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie disaster,” says Gareth Neame, Lockerbie’s executive producer. “But sometimes when you dramatise a story you bring a new perspective. We saw that, obviously, with the Post Office drama [Mr Bates vs the Post Office] — a story that had been bubbling under the headlines for years, a miscarriage of justice. Suddenly it captured people’s attention.”

Initially Swire accepted the American claim of Libyan responsibility for the bombing, but during the trial he began to have doubts. When Megrahi’s guilty verdict was read out, the doctor collapsed in disbelief, and went on to campaign for the Libyan’s retrial and release. He believes Megrahi was framed and that the bomb was planted by Iranians at Heathrow. (The US and UK governments maintain that the bomb originated in Malta, and was flown to Heathrow as part of a Libyan plot.)

Swire has been called a conspiracy theorist by some, but the drama supports his misgivings. Based on his book, Lockerbie: A Father’s Search for Justice, it has already been criticised by the American-based campaign group Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, who contend that the series will promote a “false narrative”. But its makers hope his story might become the Mr Bates vs the Post Office of 2025, generating enough public anger to prompt a closer examination of the many unanswered questions surrounding the attack.

Firth met Jim and Jane Swire a few weeks before the drama began shooting. “Jim Swire had not previously been someone with an innate distrust in institutions,” he tells me when I meet him on the courtroom set in Scotland where Megrahi’s trial is being restaged. “I’m not even sure he has that now. He simply wants to know what happened and why. He’s a rational man responding to facts as he sees them. I believe he would still be happy to be proved wrong if it meant knowing the truth.”

Firth tells me that Swire is plainly no crank. “This isn’t someone who has the kind of zealotry that makes them cling to a position no matter what. He has changed his position according to new information. He’s very, very alive to new facts, to new evidence. I think it takes quite a lot of courage to keep that up for nearly four decades, particularly when feelings are so strong. And I think a man like that is worth listening to.”

Jim Swire is 88. When we speak and I ask him how he is this morning he replies: “I’m ancient.” He peppers his conversation with references to his age and how little time he must have left. Yet when it comes to the details of the Lockerbie disaster, its ramifications and implications, he is tack-sharp.

He was, he says, “elated” on hearing that there was to be a dramatisation of his story. “Because it’s always seemed to me, throughout the past 36 years, that there is a yawning gap between the little bits that we could do as individual relatives of those who were slaughtered, and where the establishments of our country and America are on this issue. That gap is so horrendous that I know full well we have failed to bridge it. And now we need to bring it to the attention of other people who can make up their own minds about what happened.”

So what does he think happened? “The thing becomes simpler and simpler the more you know about it,” he says. “In July 1988 Iran had an Airbus with 290 innocent people on board shot down by a US missile cruiser in the Gulf. After that awful incident, instead of immediately saying, ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry,’ America decided to award a medal to the captain of the ship and ribbons to the crew, and for a long time failed to pay any compensation to the poor families.”

Swire’s theory is that the Lockerbie bombing, which targeted a flight that was supposed to be full of Americans, was meant to be revenge (a warning had been issued to US diplomats not to book tickets home for Christmas on PanAm Flight 103, allowing Flora Swire, for one, to grab a late seat). (...)

Swire is a man steeped in British institutions. His father was an officer in the Royal Engineers who ran the British garrison in Bermuda on the outbreak of the First World War. “He was a man of principle of whom I was deeply in awe,” Swire says. He was sent from the family home on Skye to board at Eton from the age of seven. He learnt esprit de corps during national service as a second lieutenant in Cyprus and Port Said, then read geology at Cambridge before retraining as a doctor and becoming a family GP.

But trying to get straight answers as to why his daughter died changed him. In 1991, in an early bid to get the Libyan suspects Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah handed over to face charges, he took matters into his own hands and travelled to Libya to meet Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in person.

This, Swire concedes, was reckless in the extreme. “Looking back, I can only blush at my own naivety. But by that stage I had had enough time to discover that what I was being told by the authorities in my own country was not true, essentially, and I was determined.”

His determination led him to make his own conclusions, based on scrupulous examination of the evidence, including fragments of a circuit board that linked the Libyans to the bombing, which Swire believes were planted by the FBI.

“What I discovered was horrendous, and I’ve been able to discover enough about the truth to know that the official version that you and I are being solemnly told, to this day, particularly by the Americans, but also by the UK authorities, is absolute nonsense.” Another alleged Libyan terrorist, Abu Agila Masud, was arrested in 2022 and is due to face trial in the US over the Lockerbie bombing next May.

Swire is very aware that not everyone agrees with his version of events. The drama shows how the American families in particular think he has been gulled by the Libyans, or vanished into a Bermuda Triangle of his own theorising. “In a post-truth situation people like me are branded by the authorities as conspiracy theorists, or whatever phrase you like to use — and the establishment is always assumed to be the upright, honest broker of truth. The American relatives, many of them, think I’m absolutely bananas.”

When I spoke to Firth, who had been given Swire’s shock of grey hair and wore his “The truth must be known” badge, he was at pains to point out that Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is not just a father’s story. It begins with the brutal actuality of what Swire calls “the slaughter”, and also follows Jane (a superb Catherine McCormack) and the rest of their family. “It’s very much about the cost to them as a couple and as a family. This isn’t just about the search for judicial truth — it’s not just a legal drama,” Firth says.

Does Firth think we will ever learn the truth about Lockerbie? “I don’t know,” he says. “But I am in awe of this man’s determination to pursue it.”

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is on Sky from Jan 2

Why haven't all the Lockerbie documents been published?

[This is the headline over a letter published today on the website of The Herald. It reads as follows:]

Regarding your recent coverage of the transfer of Lockerbie debris to the US for the Abu Agila Mas'ud trial next year, such activities will no doubt attract greater interest to the trial if that trial does occur in May 2025. 

The debris may remind some people of the horrors of the night of December 21, 1988 in the unsuspecting town, when that preventable disaster occurred in those dark and wind-rent skies high above the borders. Others will never forget.

Might it not have at least been more economical to transfer all UK Government written materials relating to their past handling of the origins of the disaster to the internet, so that the younger generation could form its own opinion about how the UK and US governments have behaved over this terrible tragedy over the past 36 years? Perhaps there would then be a little honest openness.

Your great paper sailed as close to the wind as anyone dared many years ago to try to expose some of the contents of some files concerning the Jordanian based bomb-maker Marwan Kreesat and his bomb-making prowesses, as he worked in Damascus and Neuss for the PFLP-GC terrorist group, even as that group’s funding (by Iran) was renewed: you dared to come under immediate threat of closure, did you not, in attempting to expose truth?

In our group’s 36th year in our search for the truth we believe that only the truth will still suffice for you at The Herald.

We could perhaps press for a complete disclosure of all Lockerbie-related files still held at Kew and elsewhere now that 36 years have passed. 

Which politicians would now have to blush at the audacity with which all that material was kept clear of Freedom of Information requests from the media, the public and from our group? Most are dead or disabled now. Alas that the redoubtable, loveable Scottish MP for Linlithgow, Tam Dalyell, was taken from us so many years ago.

Can significant material about terrorist groups and their links really have remained a genuine reason for secrecy all this time?

Dr Jim Swire, spokesman UK Families – Flight 103, Gloucestershire.

Fuselage of Lockerbie plane transferred to US as evidence for trial

[This is the heading over a statement issued today by the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (the body responsible for the Scottish public prosecution system). It reads as follows:]

A section of the aircraft from the Lockerbie bombing is being transported to the US ahead of a Libyan suspect’s trial in Washington DC.

The transfer forms part of an evidence sharing agreement between Scottish law enforcement authorities and American counterparts. 

Families and next of kin have been informed of the development in the approach to the 36th anniversary of the terrorist attack on 21 December. Abu Agila Mas’ud is scheduled to go on trial in May next year for several charges, including destruction of an aircraft resulting in death.  

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of the murders of 270 people by the introduction of an explosive device onto a civilian aircraft. It has always been the Crown’s contention that Megrahi acted with others in the commission of his crime. 

The Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain KC, said: 

“The trial court held that this act of state-sponsored terrorism was orchestrated by the Libyan government and that Megrahi was involved with others. That verdict has been subject of intense scrutiny and has been upheld twice in the appeal court.  

“The transfer of evidence for the trial in the US is a strong expression of the commitment that Scottish prosecutors and officers of Police Scotland have to bringing all those responsible for this terrible act to justice.” 

Chief Constable Jo Farrell said:

“My thoughts remain with the families and friends of those who lost loved ones in 1988 and who continue to show incredible dignity and strength.

“Police Scotland remains committed to working with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service and our law enforcement colleagues in the United States to support the investigation and bring those responsible for the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 to justice, no matter the passage of time.”

Laura Buchan, who is head of a team of prosecutors from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service working on the case, said: 

“Since Mas’ud was taken into custody by the US in 2022, Scottish prosecutors and police have been engaged in a formal evidence sharing process with the US Department of Justice.  

“The transfer of physical items of evidence from Scotland into US custody is beginning. The transfer includes parts of the fuselage of Pan Am 103 which are a production in the criminal investigation. We understand that the fuselage will hold significance for many of the families of those who lost their lives and they have been informed of the transfer plans.” 

The bombing of Pan Am 103 is the deadliest terrorist attack on UK soil and the largest homicide case Scotland’s prosecutors have ever encountered, both in terms of scale and of complexity. The Crown case at the Scottish court in the Netherlands in spanned 72 days and evidence from 227 witnesses. 

This was far from solely a Scottish disaster – 243 passengers, 16 crew members as well as 11 residents of Lockerbie were killed. In total the victims came from 21 different countries.

[A BBC News report about this development can be read here.]

His view of the world is left forever changed.

[What follows is excerpted from an article published today on the website of Hello! magazine:]

Colin Firth is starring in Sky's upcoming drama, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth – and it looks gripping.

The Bridget Jones star leads the cast as Dr Jim Swire, a father driven by loss in the wake of the 1988 Lockerbie disaster. The story, which is inspired by true events, follows Dr Jim and his wife Jane's fight for justice after their daughter Flora tragically died in the devastating terrorist attack. (...)

In new images [from the trailer], Colin is worlds away from his usual look as he dons snow-white locks and 80s-style glasses, while his co-star Catherine McCormack, who plays Jane, appears solemn as she gazes into the distance. 

So, what is the show about? 

The limited five-part series is based on the real 1988 Lockerbie disaster, which saw 259 passengers and crew killed when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie 38 minutes after take-off, with a further 11 residents losing their lives as the plane came crashing down.

After his daughter Flora dies in the disaster, Dr Jim Swire is nominated spokesperson for the UK victims' families, who have united to demand truth and justice. What follows is a relentless journey that sees Jim travel across continents and political divides. In doing so, he not only jeopardises his stability, family and life but completely overturns his trust in the justice system. 

The synopsis continues: "As the truth shifts under Jim’s feet, his view of the world is left forever changed.

"Exploring events from the disaster and its aftermath, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth provides an intimate account of a man, a husband, and a father who risks everything in memory of his daughter and the unflinching pursuit of truth and justice."

Starring alongside Colin and Catherine are Shetland star Mark Bonnar as Roderick McGill and Litvinenko's Sam Troughton as Murray Guthrie.

Other cast members include Ardalan Esmaili (Grey Zone, Deliver Me) as Abdulbaset al-Megrahi, Mudar Abbara (The Swimmers, In Another Life) as Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, Guy Henry (Holby City, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) as Paul Channon and Nabil Al Raee (The Teacher, 200 Meters) as Colonel Gaddafi.

Rounding out the cast as the Swire children are Jemma Carlton (Maxine, A Thousand Blows) as Cathy, Harry Redding (Red Rose) as William and Rosanna Adams as Flora. [RB: I am played in the series by John Wark (Outlander, Queen of the Desert, The Fitzroy.]

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth will air on Sky and NOW in the UK and Ireland on 2 January, 2025.

[A further report, also published today and headlined What To Expect From Lockerbie: A Search For Truth, can be found on the Country and Town House website.]

Lockerbie TV series "reminder of importance of justice, truth and resilience"

[What follows is excerpted from a long article just published on the Asap Land website:]

The tragic events of December 21, 1988, forever changed the small Scottish town of Lockerbie and the lives of hundreds of families worldwide. On that fateful day, Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a bomb just 38 minutes after takeoff from London Heathrow, killing all 259 passengers and crew on board, as well as 11 residents of Lockerbie, when debris crashed into the town. This horrific act of terrorism, which remains the deadliest in UK history, is now the subject of a highly anticipated drama series simply titled “Lockerbie.”

Set to premiere on Sky Television in the UK and Peacock in the US, Lockerbie (...) promises to be a powerful and emotional exploration of one of the most devastating events in modern aviation history.

The series will delve into the aftermath of the bombing, focusing on the relentless pursuit of justice by those affected, particularly Dr Jim Swire and his wife Jane, who lost their daughter Flora in the attack.

With a star-studded cast led by Academy Award winner Colin Firth, Lockerbie is poised to be a gripping and thought-provoking examination of tragedy, resilience, and the unwavering search for truth.

Release Date:

As of now, an official release date for Lockerbie (...) has not been announced. However, given the recent production updates and casting news, the series will likely premiere in late 2024 or early 2025.

Filming began in Scotland in February 2024, with scenes shot in the Friars Brae area of Linlithgow. This suggests that production is well underway, but post-production work, including editing and visual effects, must be completed before the series is ready for broadcast.

The release strategy for Lockerbie may involve a simultaneous premiere on Sky Television and Now TV in the United Kingdom and Ireland, with a same-day or next-day release on Peacock in the United States. (...)

Expected Storyline:

Lockerbie (...) is set to be a five-part series that will chronicle the devastating bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and its far-reaching consequences. The story will primarily focus on Dr. Jim Swire, portrayed by Colin Firth, and his wife Jane, played by Catherine McCormack.

The Swires lost their daughter Flora in the attack, and the series will follow their tireless quest for justice and truth in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Based on the book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice by Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph, the series promises to offer an intimate and personal perspective on the events surrounding the bombing.

Viewers can expect a narrative that spans several decades, from the crash’s immediate aftermath to the protracted investigation, diplomatic negotiations, and eventual trial of suspects at Camp Zeist in 2000.

The storyline will likely explore the complex web of international politics and intelligence surrounding the case, including the involvement of Libya and its leader, Colonel Gaddafi.

The series may also delve into the controversies and theories that have persisted over the years, including questions about the actual perpetrators of the attack and the reliability of the evidence presented at trial.

Through it all, the personal journey of the Swire family will serve as an emotional anchor, highlighting the human cost of this tragedy and the enduring impact it has had on the lives of those affected.

Cast Members:

Lockerbie boasts an impressive ensemble cast, bringing together some of Britain’s finest acting talent to bring this complex and emotional story to life. The confirmed cast members include:

Colin Firth as Dr Jim Swire

Catherine McCormack as Jane Swire

Sam Troughton as Murray Guthrie

Mark Bonnar as Roderick McGill

Ardalan Esmaili as Abdelbaset al-Megrahi

Mudar Abbara as Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah

Guy Henry as Paul Channon

Nabil Al Raee as Colonel Gaddafi

Jemma Carlton as Cathy Swire

Harry Redding as William Swire

Rosanna Adams as Flora Swire (...)

List of Episodes:

As Lockerbie (...) is still in production, an official list of episode titles has not been released. However, we do know that the series will consist of five episodes. Based on the known storyline and historical events, we can speculate on potential focus areas for each episode:

Episode 1: “The Day the Sky Fell” – Likely covering the day of the bombing and its immediate aftermath.

Episode 2: “A Father’s Promise” – Could focus on Dr Jim Swire’s decision to seek justice for his daughter and the other victims.

Episode 3: “The Investigation Begins” – Might detail the early stages of the international investigation into the bombing.

Episode 4: “Diplomatic Deadlock” – Could explore the challenges in bringing the suspects to trial and negotiations with Libya.

Episode 5: “The Trial at Camp Zeist” – Likely to cover the trial of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and its controversial outcome.

Creators Team:

The creative team behind Lockerbie brings together a group of highly experienced and talented individuals from British television drama. Their collective expertise promises to deliver a historically accurate and emotionally resonant series.

The series’ executive producers include Gareth Neame and Nigel Marchant from Carnival Films, known for their work on acclaimed series such as Downton Abbey. Sam Hoyle represents Sky Studios as an executive producer, bringing valuable insight from the broadcasting perspective.

The writing team is led by David Harrower, a renowned Scottish playwright, who has adapted the story from Dr Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph’s book. Maryam Hamidi joins as a guest writer for one of the episodes, adding her unique voice to the series.

Otto Bathurst and Jim Loach share directing duties for Lockerbie. Bathurst has previously directed episodes of Peaky Blinders and Black Mirror, while Loach brings experience from working on shows like Orange Is the New Black and The Crown. (...)

Where to Watch:

Lockerbie (...) will be available on multiple platforms, ensuring viewers across regions can access this critical series. Here’s a breakdown of where you can watch Lockerbie:

Lockerbie will be broadcast on Sky Television in the United Kingdom and Ireland. This means it will be available to Sky TV subscribers as part of their regular package. Additionally, the series will be available to stream on Now TV, Sky’s on-demand platform, allowing viewers to watch it at their convenience.

For audiences in the United States, Lockerbie will be exclusive to Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service. This platform offers free and premium tiers, though given its high-profile nature, Lockerbie is likely to be part of the premium content offering.

Australian viewers can watch Lockerbie on Channel 7, one of the country’s major free-to-air networks. 

Trailer Release Date:

A trailer for Lockerbie (...) has not been released, nor has an official date for the trailer’s premiere been announced. However, based on typical promotional schedules for high-profile television series, we can make some educated guesses about when to expect the first glimpse of the show.

Trailers for prestige drama series are often released 2-3 months before the show’s premiere date. Since Lockerbie will likely debut in late 2024 or early 2025, we might see the first trailer sometime in the fall of 2024. This timing would allow the promotional campaign to build momentum leading to the series premiere.

Final Word:

Lockerbie (...) stands poised to be a landmark television event, offering viewers a deeply personal and emotionally charged exploration of one of the most tragic incidents in modern history.

By focusing on the story of Dr Jim Swire and his family, the series promises to humanize the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing, reminding us of the enduring impact of such events on those left behind.

As we await the series premiere, it’s clear that Lockerbie will not only serve as a dramatic retelling of historical events but also as a poignant reminder of the importance of justice, truth, and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable loss.

With its stellar cast, experienced creative team, and the weight of its subject matter, Lockerbie (...) is set to be a thought-provoking and emotionally resonant addition to the landscape of prestige television drama.