We must have Lockerbie inquiry, no matter the cost

[This is the headline over an editorial that was published in The Herald on this date in 2011. It reads as follows:]

As Pamela Dix, whose brother died in the Lockerbie bombing, says: "It is unfinished business." Now one more step has been taken towards unravelling the uncertainty that has hung over this case ever since that awful December night 23 years ago.

Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill has revealed that he has the go-ahead under the Data Protection Act from Kenneth Clarke, his opposite number in the UK Government, to publish the 800-page Statement of Reasons from the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission (SCCRC). This document explains the grounds for appealing the conviction of the Libyan Abdel Baset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the only person convicted of the atrocity. It was never published because the appeal itself was dropped when he was released on compassionate grounds in August 2009.

It emerged earlier this year that legislation going through Holyrood could not guarantee publication because the material would continue to be subject to UK data protection legislation. Now that potential hurdle appears to have been removed.

If, as the Scottish Government maintains, it supports the maximum possible transparency in this case, it is apposite to ask why it took some time to make an official approach to the Westminster Justice Department regarding this matter. For years the UK and Scottish governments have played a slow-motion version of pass the parcel with this case, with neither seemingly prepared to increase the snail's pace progress and the prospect of political advantage (or damage) playing its part.

The imminent publication of John Ashton's biography of Megrahi may force the pace as, once the material is public, SCCRC will be free to publish it themselves. It is not clear how much further it will take us. The document dates from 2007. Fresh material and new forensic techniques have appeared in the interim. Also, in the interests of national security, some items and passages will be redacted.

Regardless of whether or not the man convicted of this crime is guilty as charged, others must have been involved. There are still many unanswered questions. Only a full and wide-ranging independent public inquiry can tackle these issues. This case may show the quality of Scottish justice in a poor light but ultimately getting at the truth is more important. It is also what the relatives of those who died desire and deserve.

First clue to Lockerbie crash found

[This is the headline over a report from this date in 1988 on the BBC News website. It reads as follows:]

Crash investigators have uncovered wreckage from Pan Am flight 103 which may hold the key to the Lockerbie air disaster.

A suitcase discovered in the wreckage of the Boeing 747 has been sent for testing at a government research centre amid speculation it may contain evidence the crash was caused by sabotage.

Bomb experts at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment in Fort Halstead, Kent, will be looking for particles which may have penetrated the suitcase and show evidence of an explosive.

It is being seen as a significant development in the investigation as it is the first piece from the wreckage to be sent for testing.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence, which runs the research unit, said: "This is the first wreckage to be sent to us. The police have chosen what they want to be examined."

Results of the study are expected to be available by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, police have announced the search for clues may mean the process of retrieving bodies could take some time.

This is because the bodies may also contain particles which show if a bomb was planted, and could shed light on the investigation.

Michael Charles, who is heading the investigation said it is not known yet if the crash was caused by structural failure or a bomb.

Investigators cannot establish if the plane disintegrated before it came to ground, suggesting a bomb, or if it was destroyed by impact on the ground after severe structural failure led to its descent.

Aviation experts have said they believe the most likely cause is structural failure after an initial inspection of the black box flight recorders did not disclose anything.

Only a split second before radar contact was lost there was a 'faint unquantified noise'.

Rescue teams are continuing their search for bodies and the death toll currently remains at 240.

Divers are searching lochs and reservoirs for one wing of the plane which is still missing.

Relations between US and Libya improving

[What follows is a snippet from the Libya News and Views website from this date in 1999:]

After years of condemning Libya as a rogue state, the Clinton administration has recently taken steps toward better relations with the government of leader Mu'ammar al-Qadhafy, citing evidence of growing moderation on the part of a leader long demonized as a patron of international terror. Since Qadhafy agreed in April to the extradition of two men suspected of blowing up a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the administration has permitted four US oil companies to visit Libya on reconnaissance missions and last month, publicly welcomed the expulsion from Libya of the infamous Abu Nidal terrorist group. Although unilateral US sanctions still bar most trade between American companies and Libya, the administration approved last spring the de facto lifting of international UN sanctions against the oil-rich North African country and -- according to a senior official -- is considering whether to lift a passport restriction that bars US citizens from traveling to Libya without a special State Department exemption. [Washington Post]

[RB: I wish a happy Christmas to all readers of this blog.]

Father Pat Keegans censored

[What follows is from an item originally posted on this blog on this date in 2009:]

Ayr priest barred from Lockerbie memorial service in Virginia

[This is the headline over a report in the [Daily Record]. It reads in part:]

An Ayr priest’s words were this week censored from a memorial service in the USA for the victims of the Lockerbie terror attack.

Canon Patrick Keegans was parish priest at Lockerbie when the attack occurred.

And he has spoken at previous services at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where there is a memorial cairn.

Canon Keegans had sent over an address to be read on Monday – the 21st anniversary of the atrocity.

But it wasn’t read out, after the leader of the American victims’ group took exception to part of it.

Canon Keegan proclaimed the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi took ‘courage’ and was the ‘right decision’.

And he further said that although few in America believe Megrahi to be innocent, the victims of the bombing ‘deserve’ justice.

But Frank Duggan, president of Victims of Pan Am 103, saw the excerpt of Canon Keegans’ address, printed by The Herald newspaper.

And he said: “Fr Keegans’ remarks, as printed in the newspaper, were deemed to be very inappropriate for this memorial service." (...)

Canon Keegans’ address also included moving and poignant tributes to victims on the ground and in the air.

And he told the Post this week: “I felt that in view of what has happened this year, I should say the things I did.

“I thought it right to present my view, and the view of many in Scotland.

“I believe in freedom of speech, but Mr Duggan’s censorship of my words has given them greater impact.”

Questions remain

[What follows is the text of an article that appeared yesterday on the website of the San Francisco Chronicle:]

When the bomb went off, it was the deadliest act of terrorism against the United States in history.

The Chronicle’s front page from Dec 22, 1988, covers the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

“A Pan American World Airways jumbo jet carrying 258 passengers and crew members from London to New York crashed in a huge fireball at a village just north of the Scottish border last evening, killing everyone on board and at least 15 people on the ground,” the story read.

Once the bodies were counted, 243 passengers and 16 crew members were dead, along with 11 people on the ground. One hundred and eighty-nine of the dead were American; 43 were British. It was the greatest loss of American life in a terrorist act until Sept 11, 2001.

In the bombing’s immediate aftermath, however, terrorism’s role wasn’t certain.

“The cause of the disaster was not clear, with speculation centering on structural failure or sabotage,” the story read.

“Among the kinds of things that might suddenly cut all power would be a bomb or an explosive decompression caused by a structural weakness.”

It was soon obvious that terrorists were to blame, but the culprit wasn’t identified.

Libya and leader Muammar Gaddafi would accept responsibility in the late 1990s, and a Libyan intelligence officer would be imprisoned for murder in 2001. Questions remain as to whether Gaddafi ordered the attack and who carried it out.

Still more questions than answers

[This is part of the headline over an article that appeared in the Malta Independent on this date in 2010. It reads as follows:]

The 22nd anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing – the worst terrorist attack in history on British soil, and the worst terrorist attack that Malta can claim any sort of relation to – was commemorated on Tuesday.

But whether that relation is one of fact or fiction is quite another story, and one which is hotly disputed between victims’ families, former investigators and legal experts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Twenty-two years of anguish for the victims’ families, 22 years in which Malta’s name has been inextricably, and arguably erroneously, linked to the heinous crime and 22 years of questionable investigations, trials, a conviction and a compassionate release of the one person to have been found guilty.

The one fundamental question still lingering is whether the truth of who ordered and carried out the Lockerbie bombing will ever be known.

With the only convicted party, Libyan Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, having dropped a highly anticipated appeal when was ‘compassionately’ released from Scottish custody, the possibility of more of the truth ever coming out appears faint. Nor will Malta’s name ever be cleared by a court of law over its apparent role as the bomb’s point of departure.

The country has been dogged for more than two decades years by the prosecution’s contention that the bomb that brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland on 21 December 1988 began its deadly journey on an Air Malta flight out of Luqa Airport.

Indeed, the only hope of answers for the families on both sides of the Atlantic, which hold very different views on the guilt of the convicted bomber, of learning the truth lies in the possibility of a separate enquiry into the case. Calls for that too, however, have been brushed aside.

Experts such as Prof Robert Black – a former Scottish judge and the architect of the original Lockerbie trial – insist that the evidence presented during the trial that the bomb had originated at Luqa Airport was some of the weakest of the entire proceedings.

Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, a former employee at Libyan Arab Airlines in Malta and the only person to have been found guilty of the terrorist attack, had been convicted largely on the basis of evidence supplied by Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci – of Mary’s House on Tower Road, Sliema.

In his evidence Mr Gauci had identified Mr al-Megrahi as the purchaser of articles of clothing and an umbrella found in the suitcase containing the bomb – placed on an Air Malta flight and transferred to the ill-fated Pan Am flight in Frankfurt.

But in reviewing the request for an appeal, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found, for numerous reasons, that “there is no reasonable basis in the trial court’s judgment for its conclusion that the purchase of the items from Mary’s House, took place on 7 December 1988” – the very argument that had sealed the indictment against Mr al-Megrahi.

That appeal, however, never came to fruition, with al-Megrahi having been released and returned to Libya, on compassionate medical grounds in that he apparently only had three months to live.

There are so many questions about the case that are still lingering, or, rather, festering that one questions whether the truth behind the Lockerbie bombing will ever be known.

The Lockerbie tragedy has left an indelible stain on Malta’s reputation – a stain that will remain, irrespective of whether an inquiry into the Lockerbie case and the evidence that was to be heard at appeal is undertaken, and regardless of what the outcome of such an inquiry would be.

Malta, for many, will always be the place from where the Lockerbie bomb started its fateful journey. An international petition has been handed in to to the Scottish Parliament urging the Scottish government to open an independent inquiry into the 2001 Kamp van Zeist conviction.

Such an inquiry would go a long way to bringing a sense of justice to the victims’ families, irrespective of the outcome, and would also help to settle the score insofar as Malta is concerned.

Prevarications, obfuscations and plain lies

[What follows is the text of a report published in today’s edition of The National:]

There will never be closure in the Lockerbie bombing case until it returns to the appeal court, according to one of Scotland’s top lawyers.

Glasgow solicitor Aamer Anwar, who represents the family of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man ever convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, was speaking to The National yesterday – the 28th anniversary of the atrocity in which 270 people died.

“Some of the British relatives, as well as the Megrahi family, do not believe that there has ever been closure,” said Anwar. “They remain determined to search for justice and the truth.

“At this stage it would be inappropriate to comment other than to say the legal process is certainly not at an end and my thoughts are with those families of the victims, but also the family of Al Megrahi. Until this case returns to the appeal court there will never be closure.”

Earlier, Megrahi’s family reiterated their belief that the Libyan was innocent of the bombing.

Writing on a social media page set up by the Friends of Justice for Megrahi (JfM), they said they were “on the right path” to finding out the truth.

They said there was new evidence and they were working “in Switzerland and Scotland” to finally prove that Megrahi was innocent.

Writing on the same page, John Mosey, who lost his 19-year-old daughter Helga in the bombing, also expressed his belief that Megrahi, who died in 2012, was innocent.

“It is now beyond clarity that the Libyan man found guilty was falsely accused and convicted,” he said. “As one of the only two relatives who attended the whole trial and first appeal in Holland, I came away convinced that a gross miscarriage of justice had been carried out.”

Mosey said that former Sheriff Principal John Mowat has said Lockerbie was “a preventable disaster”, and the question was why it had been allowed to happen.

“This question has not even been permitted to be asked let alone answered,” he said. “Every effort to raise this question has been rebuffed. Mrs Thatcher made it very plain that there would be no independent inquiry into this, the largest mass killing in the UK outside wartime.

“Our efforts to get an answer to this primary question have been reinforced by the mass of evidence that it was known beforehand that a Pan Am flight out of the UK to the USA would have a bomb on board in a Toshiba cassette player in that week before Christmas.

“At least 10 warnings were logged by the FAA and other authorities. An anonymous phone call to the US embassy in Helsinki on December 5 gave accurate details of the bomb and the week it would be deployed.”

Mosey added that he and other families still wanted an answer to the big question: “Those who we pay to govern and protect us failed miserably even though the danger was known.

“Nothing was done to either prevent the disaster or to warn the public. We have been forced down the important but subsidiary road of questioning the verdict and attacking the Scottish legal system. We do not want to have anyone hung out to dry but simply to have some transparency and honesty from those who have strung us along for all of these years with prevarications, obfuscations and plain lies.”

RIP Ambassador Andrew I Killgore

I am saddened to learn of the death on 20 December 2016 of Ambassador Andrew I Killgore, publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and a longtime seeker after Lockerbie truth. Links to his many writings on the Lockerbie case can be found here. In an email to Dr Jim Swire, Robert Forrester and me, the managing editor of WRMEA, Janet McMahon, wrote:

“I'm sorry to have to tell you the sad news that Andy Killgore died yesterday. He had gotten increasingly frail over the last year or so, and was developing a second round of pneumonia after a fall last Wednesday and did not want to go to a hospital. We visited him Friday afternoon, and he was alert, comfortable and in good spirits. We had planned to visit him again yesterday, but his daughters called us to say he had died. It is definitely a shock, but we are grateful that he did not suffer or have to endure a long painful death. His beloved family was with him.

“As you know, he was very passionate about Lockerbie. I printed out all your communications to him and he read them avidly. He had his own idea about who was responsible, of course, but certainly agreed that there has been a most grievous cover-up. We often talked about going to London or Edinburgh if there were any major development. He felt close to you all, and was glad to have you as comrades-in-arms!”

In his reply Dr Swire wrote:

“The truth is that after 28 years all of us who like Andrew still feel passionately about the deception laid upon this tragedy are ageing now and others also among us have died.

“In their memory as well as for the memory of all those who died at Lockerbie, we cannot let the matter rest, and lately I have come to believe that within the next couple of years the truth will burst out.

“When it does that will be a good time to remember people like Andrew who gave so much sincerity to the search.”

WRMEA’s obituary of Ambassador Killgore can be read here.

Lockerbie trial sabre-rattling

[What follows is the text of an article that appeared in The New York Times on this date in 1998:]

On the 10th anniversary of the bombing of a Pan Am jet over Scotland, the United States told Libya today that it will face more sanctions if two Libyan suspects are not turned over for trial by a Scottish judge in the Netherlands by February.

''Ten years is much too long to wait for justice,'' said Peter Burleigh, the American representative on the Security Council, which discussed the issue today.

In Libya, however, Col Muammar el-Qaddafi only widened the breach today, apparently rejecting the compromise plan for a trial in the Netherlands by saying that he wanted an international tribunal to hear the case. Earlier this month, Libya's National Assembly seemed to endorse the plan for a Scottish trial after a personal appeal to Colonel Qaddafi from Secretary General Kofi Annan.

''An international court is the solution,'' Colonel Qaddafi told a Dutch television interviewer in a program taped last week and broadcast in the Netherlands today, ''with judges from America, Libya, England and other countries.''

Today, however, at a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery marking the bombing, President Clinton said the plan to hold the trial in the Netherlands was a ''take it or leave it'' deal. ''We will not negotiate its terms,'' he added.

For years Libya refused to allow American or British courts to try the suspects in the bombing, which killed 270 people, including 11 on the ground in Lockerbie, the Scottish town where the plane came down. In August Britain and the United States offered the compromise of a trial in a third country, and the Netherlands agreed to allow a Scottish court to be set up for that purpose in Utrecht.

But Libya, under United Nations sanctions since 1992, continued to stall, raising questions about the treatment of the suspects and where they would be imprisoned if convicted. British officials and the Secretary General's legal counsel, Under Secretary General Hans Corell, replied exhaustively to the Libyans.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's representative at the United Nations, said today that all the questions raised by Libya had been answered.

Arab diplomats say Libya is concerned that the two suspects, Abdel Basset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, could be pressed by Western intelligence agencies or trial prosecutors to talk about more than Lockerbie.

Mr. Annan said again today that he remains optimistic that Libya will eventually comply with the request to send the suspects to the Netherlands. But the signs from Libya seem to be pointing in another direction.

In February the Security Council will review the sanctions, which would be suspended immediately if the suspects were handed over.

By February, Mr Burleigh said today, ''the Libyan Government will have had six months to accept the offer it long said it would accept.''

[RB: My neutral venue trial proposal, accepted by Libya, was on the table for four years and seven months before the United Kingdom and United States reluctantly put forward a scheme along the same lines. US criticism of Libya for taking six months to consider the ramifications of that scheme seems somewhat petty.]

Lockerbie: The 28 year lie.

[This is the headline over an item posted today on Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph’s Lockerbie Truth blog. It reads as follows:]

On this day in 1988, 21st of December, a terrorist bomb destroyed flight Pan Am 103 during its journey from Heathrow Airport in the UK to New York.

Sections of the dismembered plane and 259 passengers [and crew] fell across the Scottish town of Lockerbie and surrounding farms and fields.

In 1991 two Libyan security officers were indicted for the crime. Their trial began in May 2000.

The key prosecution claims were:

1.  Several weeks before the attack, one of the accused, Baset al-Megrahi, purchased a selection of clothes from a Maltese clothing shop.

2. Pieces of the clothing were found at the crash site.

3.  Embedded within one of the pieces was a 4mm square fragment - PT35(b) - of an electronic timer board.

4.  The FBI had proved that the fragment came from a batch of 20 such boards delivered in 1985 to Libya by Swiss electronics supplier MEBO.

5.  Two witnesses would identify the suspects and prove the case beyond doubt. The first, a CIA informant Majid Giaka; the second, a Maltese shopkeeper Toni Gauci.

The trial judges decided that Giaka  was untrustworthy, leaving Gauci as the sole identification witness.

On 31st January 2001 al-Megrahi was found guilty. The second accused, Khalifa Fhimah, was freed with "No case to answer". [RB: The court ruled that there was a case to answer, but at the end of the trial returned a verdict of Not Guilty.]

In the years since the verdict it has become clear that the world has been cynically misled by the FBI, the CIA, and British and Scottish governments.

1. In 1989 Britain's prime minister Margaret Thatcher was advised by the Americans not to enquire into the attack.

2.  Even though she and her entourage had walked across the devastated town one day after the attack, she could not - in her 1993 memoir "The Downing Street Years" - recall the existence of Lockerbie. When asked by Father of the House MP Tam Dalyell why, she said: "I know nothing of Lockerbie, and do not write about something I do not know about."

3.  Seven years after the verdict the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) discovered significant new evidence that had been concealed from the trial judges and defence team.

4.  The SCCRC discovered a secret letter written by the King of Jordan to British prime minister John Major indicating that the Libyans were innocent of the crime.

The King's letter claimed that the attack had been Iranian-funded in revenge for the 1988 destruction by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian Airbus carrying 290 pilgrims to Mecca.

5. Unknown to most journalists and public, the King had agreed to place in protective custody Marwan Khreesat, expert bomb-maker for a Palestinian group, the PFLP-GC. Khreesat had made bombs for the group in Germany, to be used to bring down American passenger planes heading for the US.

6.  US and German intelligence knew that Iran had funded the attack. They had assembled a full dossier of intelligence proving that Khreesat and the Palestinian group were guilty.

7.  On the sudden discovery of PT35(b), however, US intelligence reversed direction and accused Libya of the crime.

8. The British government tried on two occasions to prevent the king's letter becoming public. The first, a Public Interest Immunity Certificate signed by Foreign Secretary David Miliband; the second, an unsuccessful attempt by Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt to close down a Scottish newspaper to prevent publication of the story.

9.  The SCCRC re-examined evidence given in the trial and discovered that al-Megrahi was not on the island of Malta on the day that the clothing was purchased.

10.  The SCCRC also discovered that police diaries of chief police investigator Harry Bell contained a record of multi-million dollar offers of payment to the Maltese shopkeeper Gauci "provided" - in the words of a letter to Harry Bell from the US Department of Justice - "he gives evidence."

11.  The SCCRC also re-examined all the evidence given by Gauci. They concluded that his so-called "identification" was founded on numerous viewings of photographs of al-Megrahi in the media and magazines, all linking him to the bombing. Gauci's evidence was therefore not credible, and the trial judges had been mistaken.

****

Was the Lockerbie fragment PT35(b) a fake? During the trial in 2000 there were suspicions about how it had been discovered and reported on by government scientists. The trial judges had discounted these suspicions.

Then in 2009 the al-Megrahi defence team made a startling discovery. In the years since the trial and first appeal they had managed to obtain a huge set of documents from police and Scottish Crown archives. Among the documents was the forensic notebook of scientific witness Allen Feraday.

Feraday had compared PT35(b) with control samples from MST13 timer circuit boards similar to those supplied to Libya in 1985 by MEBO.

He told the trial judges: "the fragment materials and tracking pattern are similar in all respects" to that of the MST13 timer.

But nine years prior to the trial, on 1st August 1991, when examining both the fragment and a MEBO MST13 timer circuit board, he had made two hand-written entries in his notebook which contradicted this.

The first recorded that tracks on fragment PT35(b) were protected by a layer of "Pure tin". The second said that tracks on the circuit of a control sample MST13 board were covered by an alloy of "70% tin and 30% lead".

Feraday and the police were fully aware of the difference. Two police scientific advisers suggested that the heat of the explosion might have evaporated the lead content of the alloy, leaving pure tin.

Another police adviser working for Ferranti International noted that fragment PT35(b) had indications of being "home made".

Neither the scientist's reports nor the Ferranti letter were followed up. All remained hidden in police files. The judges and defence team were unaware of their contents.

In the light of this new information the defence team consulted two prominent independent experts in the field. The experts repeatedly heat tested the evaporation theory with temperatures exceeding that of the bomb explosion. But the alloy of 70/30 tin/lead remained just that.

Thuring, the company which manufactured the circuit boards used in MST13 timers , confirmed in an affidavit that they had always used a 70/30 tin/lead combination.  Fragment PT35(b) did not, therefore, come from one of their circuit boards. How it was made and by whom remains a mystery.

Feraday either perjured himself or was grossly negligent. It was upon his statement and the identification evidence by Gauci that the case against Baset al-Megrahi would turn.

All this information has been put repeatedly to the Scottish and British governments and police. They have totally ignored it. Instead, for almost two years they have claimed to be "pursuing other suspects" in the chaos that is today Libya.

The Lockerbie campaign will continue. We intend to ensure - with the help of prominent friends from around the world - that the Lockerbie verdict will prove to be a disastrous miscarriage of justice.

Jumbo jet crashes onto Lockerbie

[This is the headline over a report from this date in 1988 on the BBC News website. It reads as follows:]

A Pan Am jumbo jet with 258 passengers on board has crashed on to the town of Lockerbie near the Scottish borders.

Initial reports indicate it crashed into a petrol station in the centre of the town, between Carlisle and Dumfries, and burst into a 300-foot fireball.

Hundreds are feared dead as airline officials said flight 103 was about two-thirds full with 255 adults and three children on board.

Rescue teams have confirmed there are many casualties at the scene including townspeople who were on the ground.

The Boeing 747 left London Heathrow at 1800 GMT bound for New York's JFK airport.

Shortly after 1900 the flight disappeared from radar screens at Prestwick Air Traffic Control Centre.

At 1908 there were reports by the Civil Air Traffic Control Authorities of an explosion on the ground 15 miles north of the Scottish border.

Details of the accident are still unclear but there are unconfirmed reports the plane has ploughed into cars and houses.

An eyewitness said the aircraft has hit a central part of the town in a residential area.

"There was just a terrible explosion, you just couldn't describe it," he told the BBC.

"It is just impossible to approach the town but at the time it went up there was a terrible explosion and the whole sky lit up.

"It was virtually raining fire - it was just liquid fire."

Parts of the town are being evacuated and a hall has been converted into a refuge centre.

Dumfries and Galloway Hospital, about 20 miles away, is on emergency alert.

Ambulances from southern Scotland and Cumbria have been sent to the scene.

The RAF has sent personnel and helicopters from Scotland and Northern England, along with mountain rescue teams to help police.

The A74 has been cordoned off after police reported several parked cars on fire.

It is thought the plane would have been flying at about 31,000 ft over Lockerbie when it exploded.