Thirty years is a long time to grieve…without answers

[What follows is excerpted from an article by Marcello Mega published in today's edition of the Daily Express:]

Flight PanAm 103 was only 38 minutes into its flight from London to New York in December 1988 when a bomb hidden in a Toshiba cassette recorder and smuggled into its hold exploded.

The force of the blast punched a 20-inch hole in the left hand side of the fuselage of the jumbo jet and a subsequent investigation concluded that the nose of the plane was blown off within three seconds of the bomb’s detonation.

Victims and debris were flung over an 81-mile corridor covering 845 square miles. One wing section hit number 13 Sherwood Crescent in the Scottish border town of Lockerbie at 500 miles per hour. Its occupants Doris and Maurice Henry were killed instantly and nine other residents of the street also died.

Disputes over who planted the bomb have raged ever since and, on this side of the Atlantic, Dr Jim Swire – who lost his daughter Flora in the disaster – has been the most prominent campaigner against the official version of events. Now aged 82 he fears he might not live to see justice done for his daughter.

Swire is always dignified and articulate despite the quiet fury that has burned within him since Flora was murdered, on the eve of her 24th birthday, along with 258 others on the plane.

On December 21, he and other relatives who lost loved ones will mark the 30th anniversary of Europe’s most devastating terrorist atrocity but Swire notes pointedly that their numbers are dwindling.

“Thirty years is a long time to grieve, especially without answers,” he says. “We are beginning to die out in this group of relatives. Justice has been slow and inconsiderate. We above all deserve to know who murdered our loved ones and why it was not prevented.”

Swire and the other UK relatives have never believed in the guilt of the Libyan intelligence agent convicted of the bombing by a specially-created Scottish court in the Netherlands in 2001.

Three Scottish judges sat without a jury and concluded that Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was guilty, while his co-accused, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was not.

Swire sat through every minute of evidence over many months firmly believing he would see and hear the proof of Libyan guilt but he was so sure after hearing all the witnesses that both men were innocent that he fainted on hearing the guilty verdict.

Those close to him in the court feared he had dropped dead from the shock as he was out cold for several minutes.

In the years between the verdict and Megrahi’s death from cancer aged 60 in 2012, having been released from prison on compassionate grounds in 2009, Swire befriended the “bomber” and visited him in jail and later at his home in Tripoli, even apologising for the injustice he had suffered.

“When I met Baset, I had no problem shaking his hand because I sat in court every day and listened to all the evidence and I knew his hands had not been involved in the murder of my daughter,” he says.

“There was a natural warmth between us and each could sympathise with the other. He understood how I might feel having lost my much-loved daughter in the most atrocious way and I understood the pain he and his family must feel at their separation. I could also imagine how devastating it must be to be labelled a mass murderer unfairly.

“We became friends. He comforted me over the loss of my daughter and I apologised to him for what he and his family were being put through by the Scottish justice system and most of the time we talked about how we could get to the truth.”

Totally convinced that Megrahi’s conviction had been engineered for political reasons after the West’s relationships with Middle-Eastern states changed because of the first Gulf War – when Iran allowed the US and UK to attack Iraq from its air bases – Swire has played his part in trying to discover the truth.

Five years ago, he travelled to Sweden to confront Mohammed Abo Talb, a convicted terrorist then recently released from a 20-year sentence in that country, hoping to question him over his suspected role in the bombing.

The terrorist hid from the then 77-year-old behind his wife, refusing even to talk through an open second-floor window.

In Scotland and in the US, the authorities continue to maintain that Megrahi was guilty and that the bombing was planned and paid for by Libya, though the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission is expected to refer Megrahi’s case for a posthumous appeal shortly.

In 2007, the commission referred the case for appeal, stating there may have been a miscarriage of justice on six grounds, among them the fact that no reasonable court could have convicted Megrahi on the evidence presented, a damning condemnation of the verdict.

In 2009, Megrahi, by then diagnosed with terminal cancer, abandoned his appeal to secure a transfer home. Swire is certain that the SCCRC cannot ignore the evidence it had unearthed more than a decade earlier.

“I am certain there will be another appeal, and that the conviction cannot be maintained in the face of overwhelming evidence that points away from my friend,” he says. “But the authorities are in no hurry.

“They like to delay. They create the delays, and I wonder whether I will even see the conviction quashed, never mind the investigation that must follow into who really did it.”

Swire, like many informed Lockerbie watchers, believes the terror group, the PFLP-GC, the first suspects in the case, were the culprits, and that the bombing was ordered and paid for by Iran.

When an Iran Airbus carrying pilgrims to Mecca was shot down over the Gulf by the US vessel Vincennes five months before Lockerbie, killing all 290 on board, the Iranians said the skies would run with the blood of Americans.

Rather than offer an apology, the Americans further provoked the Iranians by giving William C Rogers III, the captain of the Vincennes, an award for “bravery”.

Swire was appalled by the disregard the US displayed for the victims and remains certain that it contributed to the awful fate endured by his daughter and 269 others.

His anger, however, is not confined to the real culprits, or even to the US and Scottish investigators, who he believes wilfully ignored the evidence against Iran and the PFLP-GC to pursue Libya for political reasons.

He is also angry with successive UK governments for allowing it to happen in the first place and then for failing to deliver truth and justice. He still craves the full public inquiry that would force senior politicians and senior intelligence figures to reveal what they knew.

“When Sheriff Principal John Mowatt QC published his report in October 1990 into the fatal accident inquiry he chaired, he said the bombing had been avoidable,” he says.

“Cecil Parkinson, who became Secretary of State for Transport in 1989, promised the relatives a full public inquiry, then had to let us down because Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t allow it.

“In the lead-up to Labour winning the election in 1997, we met with Robin Cook and Tony Blair and were promised it would be different when they won power. After they won, they stopped returning our calls.

“We know there were warnings to intelligence agencies about a threat to Pan Am flights at this time. We know this plane was only two-thirds full when every other flight from Heathrow to JFK in that week before Christmas flew at least at 95 per cent capacity and we know that some VIPs who were booked on the flight didn’t travel.

“We also believe the three-flights’ theory to be nonsense, and it was never proved in court. The judges said the Crown had failed to prove there was an unaccompanied case on the flight from Malta to Frankfurt and clung to the flimsiest possibility of an unaccompanied case on the flight to Heathrow.

“All the evidence tells us the bomb was loaded at Heathrow. It was our government’s responsibility to keep Flora and all the others safe.

“Any parent who lost a child in these circumstances would be shouting for answers, and 30 years on we are still shouting and we need to be heard.”