Louis Theroux firm to produce Lockerbie documentary

[This is the headline over a report published in today's edition of The Times. It reads in part:]

Louis Theroux’s production company is to make a three-part documentary on the Lockerbie disaster.

Sky has commissioned the acclaimed filmmaker’s company to examine Britain’s deadliest terrorist atrocity and its aftermath.

Titled Lockerbie, it will tell the story of the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, when 270 people died on the night of December 21, 1988. The documentary will speak to individuals closely linked to the disaster and the years-long investigation that followed.

With access to victims’ families, investigators, intelligence officers and other key figures who have not spoken until now, Sky said the series will “examine unanswered questions to provide a definitive account of the bombing and its aftermath and, ultimately, who was responsible.”

Theroux will not present the series but it is being made by his production company Mindhouse, which he founded with his wife (...)

Lockerbie was “exactly the sort of project I wanted us to get involved with when we set up”, Theroux, 52, said.

“Our values are about storytelling and being audience-friendly, and I’m not ashamed to say we want to reach a really wide audience.” John Dower, who will direct the series, said: “I vividly remember Lockerbie from my teenage years of growing up in a Scottish household, but revisiting the event over 30 years later realised how little I knew about the actual event and the way it continues to reverberate down the years.”

Sky announced this year that it is making a separate drama on the 1988 bombing, based on the fight for justice by Dr Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora died in the disaster.

Swire has never wavered in his belief in the innocence of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan (...) convicted of the bombing.

Poppy Dixon, director of documentaries and factual for Sky, said: “The rigorous and thoughtful approach that John and the team are taking leaves me in no doubt this series will do justice to this complex story.”