Disturbing History - The Bombing Of Pan Am Flight 103

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

At two minutes past seven on the evening of December 21, 1988, an air traffic controller at Prestwick watched a single radar return break apart into a spray of echoes over the Solway Firth. Thirty-eight minutes out of Heathrow, at 31,000 feet, a bomb the size of a paperback had gone off in the forward cargo hold of a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of the Seas.Two hundred and fifty-nine people were aboard. Eleven more were at home on a residential street in Lockerbie, four days from Christmas, when the wings came down on top of them.This episode is the full account: the physics of the three seconds it took the nose to separate, the crater at Sherwood Crescent, the 845 square miles of Scottish moorland that became the largest crime scene in British history, and the small-town police force of fewer than 400 officers that suddenly found itself running an international terrorism investigation. It's also about the women of Lockerbie who washed and pressed the victims' clothing by hand so it wouldn't go back to families covered in jet fuel, and about a 14-year-old boy who was in a neighbour's garage assembling his sister's Christmas bicycle when his house stopped existing.Then there's the case itself, which is where this gets genuinely difficult. A fragment of printed circuit board smaller than a thumbnail, found jammed into a fold of aluminium in a wrecked baggage container in January 1989, carried the entire weight of the prosecution. It led investigators to a Swiss timer company, to a clothes shop in Malta, and eventually to two Libyan intelligence officers in a courtroom on a decommissioned air base in the Netherlands. One was acquitted.One was convicted of 270 murders on the strength of a shopkeeper who described a man four inches taller and fourteen years older than the accused, who was shown photographs before he made an identification, and who was paid $2 million by the United States government after he'd finished giving evidence.I go through the Iranian and PFLP-GC theory that investigators were chasing for a year before Libya entered the picture, the barometric bombs found in West Germany two months before Lockerbie, the padlock cut on a Heathrow security door eighteen hours before the flight that the trial court never heard about, and the two Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission findings that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred.I also separate the serious objections from the drug-mule and dark-suits nonsense that has cluttered this case for thirty-seven years.And it isn't finished. A Libyan man accused of building the bomb is sitting in a Washington courtroom right now, waiting on a judge's ruling about whether an unrecorded confession taken in a Libyan detention facility in 2012 can go before a jury. Jury selection is scheduled for late August 2026.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner. of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew.

And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place.

History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. At two minutes past seven on the evening of December 21st, 1988, an air traffic controller named Allen Top was sitting at a radar screen in Prestwick on the Ayrshire coast, watching a single square of light drift northwest across the Solway Firth. The square was Pan American World Airways Flight 103, a Boeing 747 bound for New York with 259 people aboard, climbing towards. its cruising altitude and waiting on clearance to cross the Atlantic. Down the line at Shanwick, the clearance delivery officer had just transmitted that clearance.

Nobody answered. On top screen, the single square broke apart and became a spray of returns, spreading outward like a stain, and he did what any controller would do, which was called the aircraft again, and then again, and then have a colleague ask a nearby airliner to try. Nobody could raise them. Just under six miles below, inside. a minute, the town of Lockerby was on fire. I want to start with the radar screen, because the radar screen is where the record is clearest. Almost everything else about this story is contested. The evidence, the verdict, the motive, the timeline, the identity of the men who did it, the honesty of the investigators, the reliability of the witnesses. Nearly 40 years on,

there's still an active federal prosecution running in Washington, and there are people who've spent their entire adult lives arguing that the one man ever convicted of this crime had nothing to do with it. I'm going to take you through all of that. But before the argument start, I want a fixed point, and Allen Topps' radar screen is a fixed point. The aircraft was there, and then it wasn't, and the timing is recorded to the second. 702 and 50 seconds. That's the moment. That's when the improvised explosive device inside a brown Samsonite hardshell suitcase, sitting in a metal baggage container in the forward hold on the left side of the aircraft, detonated. Let me back up about an hour, because the ordinariness of what came before is part of what

makes this case so hard to hold in your head. Pan Am 103 was a two-leg operation that day. The first leg, 103A, was a Boeing 727 that came in from Frankfurt to London Heathrow, carrying passengers and interline baggage. Those passengers and that baggage were transferred to the transatlantic aircraft, which was a 747 registered as November 739, Papa Alpha, one of the early production airframes, delivered in 1970 and originally named Clipper Morning Light. She was renamed Clipper Made of the Seas at the end of the 1970s.

She was the 15th 747 ever built. She was 18 years old, and she had a little little. over 72,000 hours on the airframe, which in commercial aviation terms is middle-aged and completely unremarkable. The flight deck crew was Captain James McCory, 55, First Officer Raymond Wagner, 52, and flight engineer Jerry Averett, 46. Between the three of them, they had something in the neighborhood of 30,000 flying hours. There were 13 cabin crew, 243 passengers boarded. The aircraft pushed back from the gate at four minutes past six, which against a scheduled departure of six o'clock is essentially on time, and got airborne from Heathrow at 25 minutes past six.

The routing took her northwest to cross England toward the Scottish border, climbing. She leveled off at flight level 310, which is 31,000 feet, at four minutes to seven, roughly 25 miles north of Manchester. First officer Wagner made a routine call asking for ocean. shianic clearance, which is the permission you need to enter the North Atlantic track system. That was the last thing anybody on that airplane said to anybody on the ground. At two minutes and 44 seconds past seven, Shanwick transmitted the clearance. Nobody acknowledged it.

Six seconds later, the bomb went off. Here's what the accident investigators eventually determined about those next few seconds. The device was small. Published estimates have varied. When the American Justice Department announced the indexes, indictments in 1991. It described the charge as 10 to 14 ounces of plastic explosive. Other figures in the forensic literature run from about 340 grams up to around 450. The number most often cited is somewhere near 400 grams of Semtex H, a plastic explosive of Czechoslovak

manufacture. Call it under a pound. It was concealed inside a Toshiba radio cassette player, a model called the Bomb Beat RT-Dash SF16, and that radio was packed into a brown hard-shell Samsonite suitcase along with a quantity of clothing. The suitcase was sitting in a metal luggage container designated AVE4,421, which had been loaded into position 14 left in the forward cargo hold on the left side of the aircraft. 400 grams of Semtex is not a large charge. It's not enough on its own to destroy a Boeing 740. What destroyed the airplane was where it was sitting. The container was positioned against the curve of the fuselage in a spot where the skin of the aircraft was only a few feet away.

When the charge went off, it punched a hole in the fuselage roughly 20 inches across, with a distinctive peddled pattern around the edges that investigators later described as a starburst, 20 inches. You could climb through it, barely. But the hole was the smallest part of what that charge did to a pressure. tube at 31,000 feet. The blast wave went out through the hole and also reflected back off the internal structure. Shock waves traveling through the aircraft's own aluminum skin and stringers moved faster than the waves traveling through the air, which meant the structure ahead of the blast was already failing before the pressure pulse arrived. The air accidents investigation branch

identified what's called a mock stem effect, where reflected shock waves reinforce each other and produce pressures far higher than the original blast. Cracks ran forward and outward from the hole through the fuselage skin. The nose section, containing the flight deck and the forward part of the upper deck, separated from the rest of the aircraft. The investigators put the time from detonation to nose separation at approximately three seconds. The crew had no time to transmit anything. There was no distress call, no squawk of an emergency transponder code, no evidence of any emergency procedure having been started. The cockpit voice recorder captured a loud noise lasting about 180 milliseconds and then

stopped because the power was gone. That's the entire acoustic record of the destruction of an airplane. I've stood in rooms where people argued about what a crew might have known. In this case, the physics answers it. They knew nothing. Whatever happened to the 259 people on that aircraft happened to them without warning and without a decision to make. The nose section, still recognizable as the front of a 747, tumbled away and fell more or less intact. It came down in a field across the road from Tundergarth Church, about three

miles east of Lockerby. It landed on its left side with the cockpit windows facing the sky, and the photograph of it lying in that grass, with the blue Pan Am globe still legible on the paint, became the image the world used for this crime. If you know one picture from Lockerbie, It's that one. The rest of the aircraft came apart in the air over the town. The wings, which contained the fuel tanks, stayed joined to the center section of the fuselage, and came down as one enormous mass of metal and kerosene.

Sherwood Crescent is a residential street on the southwestern edge of Lockerby, running near the A-74, which at that time was the main road between Glasgow and Carlisle. Ordinary houses, council-built and privately owned semis and terraces, gardens, garages, families. Four days before Christmas, most of them had trees up. Roughly 47 seconds after the explosion,

the wings in the center section struck the house at number 13 Sherwood Crescent at more than 500 miles an hour, with about 91 tons of jet fuel still in the tanks. There was no fire in the conventional sense, not at first. There was an explosion of vaporized kerosene that residents afterwards described as a column of flame that went up and then rolled outward.

It scoured a crater into the street about 155 feet long, with a measured volume of around 560 cubic meters, and it threw something on the order of 1,500 tons of debris into the air. The British Geological Survey seismic station at Esdollmore 14 miles away recorded the impact as a seismic event of 1.6 on the Richter scale. The houses at the center of that crater didn't collapse. They stopped existing. 21 more homes were damaged so badly they had to be demolished afterwards. The fireball crossed the carriageway of the A-74 and set cars alight.

Eleven people who lived on Sherwood Crescent died that evening. Maurice Henry, 63, and his wife, Dora, 56. At number 13, the house the wing hit. Their bodies were never found. Mary Lancaster, 81 at number 11. Jean Murray, 82. at number 14. John and Rosaline Somerville, both 40, at number 15, and their children. Paul 13 and Lindsay, 10. Thomas Flanagan, 44, his wife Kathleen, 41, and their daughter,

Joanne, 10 at number 16. 14-year-old Stephen Flanagan wasn't in the house. He'd taken his sister's Christmas present, a new bicycle, next door to a neighbor's garage so he could assemble it before the 25th. He was in that garage when the wing came down. He came out to find the house gone. Nothing of his mother or father was ever recovered. Only part of his sister's body was found. I've worked scenes.

I've done next-a-kin notifications, and I've stood in the middle of a debris field and tried to figure out where to start. What happened at Sherwood Crescent is outside the range of any of that. There was no scene to process in the way a police officer understands the word. There was a hole in the ground where a row of houses had been. and the material that had been in those houses and in the airplane was distributed across the surrounding fields. Other parts of the aircraft came down elsewhere in the town.

The rear fuselage, where a great many of the passengers had been sitting, came down about half a mile away in the Rosebank area and destroyed a house at Park Place belonging to a woman named Ella Ramsden. She was pulled out of the wreckage alive. Engines came down in the streets. one of them ended up sitting on the tarmac like a piece of dropped industrial equipment and the photographs of Lockerbie residents standing around it, hands in pockets, in winter coats, are almost harder to look at than the wreckage itself, because they look exactly like

people looking at something that makes no sense, and bodies fell. That's the part that people who weren't there struggle with, and the part that the people who were there have never been able to put down. Two hundred and fifty-nine people came out of an airplane, at 31,000 feet over a Scottish market town on a windy December evening, and the wind took them. They came down in gardens on rooftops on the golf course, in fields and hedgerows on farm tracks. Around 100 were found in the fields near Tundergarth, close to where the nose section landed. Others came down miles away. A small number of them, according to the pathology evidence led at the later trial, may have been alive when they left the aircraft. That's not a

claim about consciousness or awareness. The medical finding was that some victim's injuries were consistent with having been alive at the moment of impact with the ground. Whether anybody was conscious during the fall is not something the evidence establishes. What the evidence does establish is that nobody survived. Lockerby had a population of about 4,000 people. The police force responsible for it, Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, was one of the smallest in Britain, with fewer than 400 officers covering a largely rural region. Within a couple of hours of the crash, they were running the largest criminal investigation in the history of the United Kingdom, and they'd become the lead agency in what would turn into a joint operation with the Federal Bureau of

Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, and the forensic scientists of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment. Chief Constable John Boyd took command. Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr was appointed senior investigating officer. Neither of them had ever run anything remotely like it, because nobody had. The first order of business that night was an investigation. It was fire, and it was people. Fire crews came in from across Dumfreeshire and over the border from Cumbria.

Mountain rescue teams came down from the borders. Soldiers arrived. Local farmers turned out with tractors and lamps. The town hall became a control center. Center, and the ice rink became a mortuary. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Here's a detail that I'm sure most of you have never heard.

In the days that followed, women in Lockerbie took on the job of washing the victim's clothing. Personal effects were being recovered from the fields, thousands of items, and they were coming in, soaked in fuel, and mud, and worse. Somebody made the decision that when these things went back to families, they wouldn't go back like that. So local volunteers laundered them, press them, and packed them. Not because it was procedure. There was no procedure. They did it because those were somebody's children's clothes.

There's no way to make that into a lesson. It's just what they did. The identification effort took weeks. Pathologists worked through the Christmas period. All 270 of the dead were eventually identified, which given the condition of many of the remains was an extraordinary piece of forensic work. Some victims weren't recovered until spring, when farmers found remains in hedgerows and drainage ditches as the weather turned. Meanwhile, the search for the aircraft itself was beginning, and the numbers on that are difficult to take in.

The debris field covered approximately 845 square miles. Wind at altitude had scattered the lighter material eastward in a trail more than 80 miles long, across the Scottish borders and into northern England. Searchers walked that ground in lines. Police officers, soldiers, volunteers, shoulder to shoulder, across Moorland and forestry plantation and sheep pasture in a Scottish winter, picking up and bagging and logging every fragment of anything. More than 5,000 people took part in the search. They recovered around 319 tons of aircraft wreckage, and more than 80% of the airplane itself was eventually accounted for. By December of 1989, investigators had logged roughly 16,000 items of property,

taken over 35,000 photographs, and driven something close to one and a half million miles. By the time the indictments were announced two years later, the figures had grown to something over 15,000 witness statements, and around 18,000 items recovered and recorded. Every item was logged into the Home Office Large Inquiry System, given a reference, and x-rayed for second-year-old. secondary devices before anybody handled it. That logging discipline is the single most important thing about the entire Lockerby investigation, because everything that came afterwards, the case for the

prosecution and the case against the prosecution, is an argument about those labels and those numbers. Now let me tell you who was on the airplane, because the case has a way of turning into a discussion about circuit boards and Maltese shopkeepers, and it's worth remembering what the arithmetic is actually counting. 259 people in the air, 11 on the ground, 21 nationalities, 190 of the dead were American citizens, 43 were British. The Crown Office has put the arithmetic of the loss in these terms. More than 400 parents lost a son or a daughter.

46 parents lost their only child. More than 140 people lost a parent. Seven children lost both. 35 of the passengers were students from Syracuse University in New York, coming home from a semester abroad at the University's London program. They'd been booked on to that flight because it was the cheap one. They were 19, 20, 21 years old, and they were four days from Christmas with their parents. Flora Swire was 23, a medical researcher flying to the United States to spend time with her boyfriend.

Her 24th birthday would have been on the 23rd of December. Her father, a doctor named Jim Swire, has spent the last 37 years on this case, and will come back to him repeatedly, because he became one of the most persistent and most unusual figures in the whole story. Helga Mosey was 19. Her father, the Reverend John Mosey, would spend the following decades sitting through hearings alongside Swire. Michael Bernstein was 41, a lawyer with the United States Department of Justice who worked in the Office of Special Investigations. the unit that hunted down Nazi war criminals living in America. He was coming home from a work trip.

His widow, Stephanie Bernstein, is still attending court sessions in Washington in 2026, which tells you something about the length of this thing. Burnt Carlson was a Swedish diplomat, the United Nations Commissioner for Namibia, and an assistant secretary general, and he was flying to New York for the signing of the accords that would lead to Namibian independence. His presence on the flight has fed a great deal of speculation over the years about whether he was a target. There's never been evidence to support that. There's never been evidence to exclude it either, which is a sentence I'm going to be typing a lot in this episode.

Two American intelligence officers were aboard. Matthew Gannon was the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy station chief in Beirut. Major Charles McKee was a defense intelligence agency officer who had also been working in Beirut. route, reportedly on matters relating to the American hostages held in Lebanon. Two diplomatic security service officers from the State Department, Ronald LaRivier and Daniel O'Connor, were also on the flight, four American government personnel with security responsibilities on the same aircraft at the same time. That fact is real, and it's the seed of an enormous amount of what came afterward. Because once you know that, every subsequent oddity

in the investigation reads different. to a certain kind of observer, and I understand the impulse. In my experience, when four people with security clearances die together, it invites a question. The question is legitimate. The answers that have been built on top of it have ranged from serious to absurd, and I'll separate those out later. And then there was Khalid Jafar, 20 years old, Lebanese American, traveling from Germany. He would be posthumously accused in books and documentaries of being a lot of being a lot of

an unwitting courier who carried the bomb aboard as part of a drug-running operation. Investigators found no evidence for it. His family has spent 37 years dealing with a story about their son that appears to have been invented. Something else needs to go on the record here, because it goes to the disturbing part of disturbing history, and it isn't about Libya or Iran or circuit boards. It's about warnings. On the 5th of December, 1988, 16 days before the bombing, A man telephoned the United States Embassy in Helsinki and said that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States would be bombed within the next two weeks, and that it would be done by a Finnish woman carrying a device given to her by someone connected to Abu Nidal's

organization. The Federal Aviation Administration issued a security bulletin about it. That bulletin went to airlines. It also got posted on a notice board at the American Embassy in Moscow, where diplomats and embassy staff could read it. Finnish police investigated the call and concluded it was a hoax, and the man who made it was later identified and appears to have been a fantasist with no actual knowledge. The president's commission that examined all of this afterwards concluded that the

Helsinki warning was not credible and had nothing to do with the actual bombing. But here's the thing that families could not get past, and I don't blame them. American government personnel in Moscow had the opportunity to read a warning about a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt. The passengers on the actual Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt did not. There was no mechanism in 1988 for a threat warning like that to reach the traveling public. And there was, on the evidence, an informal mechanism by which it reached people with government jobs. Separately, and more importantly, there was a genuine warning and circulation that had nothing. to do with Helsinki.

In November of 1988, the Federal Aviation Administration circulated a bulletin to airlines, describing a specific type of device, a bomb built into a Toshiba radio cassette player, using a barometric trigger designed to detonate at cruising altitude. That bulletin existed because West German police had found exactly such a device two months earlier. Which brings us to the first real lead in the case, and to the theory that a lot of very serious people still believe is the correct one. On the 26th of October, 1988, the West German federal police, the Bundes Criminal Amt, ran a coordinated series of raids against a cell of the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine General Command. The operation was codenamed

Autumn Leaves. It centered on Neuss, near Dusseldorf. The General Command is a Splinter faction. It broke away from the mainstream popular front in 1968 under a former Syrian army officer named Ahmed Gibreel, and it distinguished itself from its parent organization by being less interested in politics and more interested in operations, particularly operations involving aircraft. Gibral's people were the ones who pioneered barometric triggered bombs and luggage. A barometric switch is a beautifully simple and appalling piece of engineering. It's a pressure sensor. As the aircraft climbs and cabin pressure drops, the switch closes.

Usually it's wired to start a timer, so the bomb doesn't detonate the instant the aircraft leaves the ground, but some fixed period after it reaches altitude. In the autumn leaves raids, the Germans arrested a man named Hafez Dalcimony, a senior general command figure, and a Jordanian named Marwan Kressat, who was in the cell as its bomb maker. They found a device. It was built into a Toshiba Bomb Beat radio cassette player, a different model from the one used on Pan Am 103, but the same product family,

and it contained Simtex and a barometric trigger. Cresot was released after a few days. The reason is that Marwan Cresot was at the time, an informant for Jordanian intelligence, and the Jordanians had an arrangement with the Germans. Cresot later gave a statement to the Federal Bureau of Investigations, in which he said he'd built five devices for the cell and had deliberately constructed them so they wouldn't work properly. Four were recovered by the Germans in and around the autumn

leaves arrests. The fifth was not immediately accounted for, and a further device turned up in a subsequent German search the following year. So two months before Lockerbie, a Palestinian group with a documented history of putting barometric bombs on airliners was operating in West Germany, building bombs into Toshiba radios, and at least one of their devices went temporarily unaccounted for. Pan Am 103 began its journey in Frankfurt. Now add the motive. On the 3rd of July, 1988, the guided missile cruiser USS Vincen, operating in the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran-Iraq War, fired two surface-to-air missiles at an aircraft its crew had identified as a hostile Iranian F-14, making an attack run.

The aircraft was Iran Air Flight 655, an Airbus A-300 on a scheduled passenger service from Bandar Abbas to Dubai. It was climbing on its assigned airway squawking a civilian transponder code. 290 people were killed, including 66 children. The United States expressed regret and paid compensation years later under an international settlement but never issued a formal apology. and the Vincennes crew received service awards on their return. In Tehran, that combination was received exactly the way you'd expect. Iranian officials made public statements promising retaliation. Investigators on both sides of the Atlantic worked for the first year of the Lockerbie

inquiry on the theory that Iran had contracted Ahmed Gibral's general command to bring down an American airliner, and that the payment involved was in the region of $10 million. That figure appears in intelligence reporting and in journalism from the period. It's never been proven in a courtroom. I'll tell you, on the material available in 1989, that was a completely reasonable working theory. It had motive. It had capability. It had opportunity.

And it had a matching bomb design in the same country the flight originated from. If I'd caught this case as an investigator in January, 1989, that's the direction I'd have been running. And then the investigation turned around and went somewhere else entirely. The turn came out of the forensic work, and to understand why it was so persuasive at the time, you have to understand what those people actually pulled off. The wreckage was taken first to an Army Depot at Longtown, in Cumbria, just over the border. From there, the critical structural material went to the Air Accidents Investigation Branch facility at Farnborough and Hampshire. There, investigators built a scaffold and reconstructed the forward fuselage of the aircraft,

not a diagram. The thing itself, panel by panel, from fragments recovered off Scottish hillsides, hung on a frame in the correct geometric relationship to each other. It's one of the most impressive pieces of accident investigation ever done, and it produced the 20-inch starburst hole in the left side of the fuselage at Station 700, which is a longitudinal reference position on the airframe. Then they went to the baggage containers. Two of them showed damage that didn't match anything the crash could produce.

Container A, VE 4,041, made of metal, and a fiberglass container next to it. AVN-7511 showed blackening, pitting, and suiting on their surfaces. Pitting is the signature. High-velocity explosive products embed themselves in men. metal and leave a characteristic microscopic cratering that impact and fire don't produce. Chemical analysis on residues from that container returned P-E-T-N and R-D-X, the two nitrate esters that make up Semtex, along with the traces of the material used to stabilize it. That's a definitive result.

That's not an inference. There had been an explosion of a plastic explosive inside that specific container. From the aircraft loading records, the investment. Investigators knew where container AVE 4,041 had been sitting. Position 14 left, forward hold, left side, right up against the region of the airframe with the hole in it. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Geometry closed the loop.

Then, on the 17th of January, 1989, a branch inspector examining a buckled section of that container's aluminium skin found something jammed into a fold in the metal. Charred fragments of material, and among them, a small piece of printed circuit board. That's the entire investigation in one sentence. A piece of circuit board jammed into a crease in a luggage container, thrown out of an airplane at 31,000 feet. The forensic scientists at the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment, principally Dr. Thomas Hayes and Alan Faraday,

went to work on the recovered fragments. They identified pieces of a Toshiba radio cassette player and eventually narrowed the model down. Faraday traveled to West Germany to examine the device recovered in autumn leaves. The Lockerbie fragments didn't precisely match the model used by the general command, but they were close enough that Toshiba was contacted, and with the manufacturer's assistants, the field was narrowed to the model designated RT-SF-16. They also recovered charred fragments of clothing that had cloned, clearly been packed in the same suitcase, because they'd been shredded and scorched from the

inside out. And on some of those fragments there were labels. The labels said Malta. An investigator flew to Valletta. The clothing was traced to a manufacturer called Yorkie Clothing, and Yorkie's records led to a small shop in the seaside town of Sleema called Mary's House, run by a man named Tony Gouchy and his brother Paul. Gouchy remembered the sale. He said a customer had come in and bought an odd assortment of items, apparently without much interest in size or matching, and had left without taking a piece of clothing he'd paid for. That's an unusual enough transaction that a shopkeeper might remember it years later, and Gauchy did. The items he described corresponded closely to what the forensic scientist had recovered from the container. Trousers,

a cardigan, a tweed jacket, a pajama set, an umbrella, and among the rest, a shirt. Among the fragments were covered from the debris field. A piece of a shirt collar was found. It carried the brand name Slalom. And embedded in a scrap of material associated with it was that piece of circuit board cataloged under the reference PT35B. In June of 1990, a Federal Bureau of Investigation Forensic examiner named Thomas Thurman identified that fragment. He matched it, he said, to a circuit board from an electronic timer of a type designated MST-T-13. The MST-13 was manufactured in Zurich by a small company called Meebo, run by two men named Erwin Meister and Edwin Bollier. Meebo's records and Bollier's own account indicated that a batch of 20 MST-13 timers had been supplied to Libya,

and specifically to Libyan military and intelligence customers. A near-identical timer had already turned up once before. When two Libyan intelligence officers were arrested in Senegal in February 1980, with explosives and a timing device in their luggage. And Mibo's office building in Zurich as it happened had at one time housed a company connected to a Libyan intelligence officer. Put all of that together and you can see how the case assembled itself in the minds of the investigators.

Clothing bought in Malta. Malta connected to Libyan Arab Airlines. A timer sold to Libya, a Libyan intelligence service with a documented record of terrorism, including the bombing of a discotheque in West Berlin in April 1986 that killed three people and injured more than 200, which had triggered American airstrikes on Tripoli and Benghazi. A regime under Muammar Gaddafi that had every reason to want revenge for those air strikes.

The theory turned 180 degrees. Iran and the General Command went into the file, and Libya came out of it. The men the investigation settled on were Abdul Basit Ali-Momid al-Meghrahi. and al-Amin Khalifa FEMA. McGrahy was an officer of the Libyan Intelligence Service, the Jamahiria Security Organization, and he'd worked as head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines. FEMA was the Libyan Arab Airlines station manager at Luka Airport in Malta.

The prosecution case, as it eventually took shape, ran like this. McGrahy arrived in Malta on the 20th of December 1988, traveling on a coded passport in a false name. Ahmed Khalifa Abdusimad. He stayed overnight at the Holiday Inn in Sliyama, which is a short distance from Mary's house. On the morning of the 21st, he flew out of Luca to Tripoli. FEMA, with airside access as a station manager,

introduced an unaccompanied brown Samsonite suitcase into the baggage system at Luca, tagged for interline transfer, and it traveled on Air Malta Flight KM-180 to Frank. At Frankfurt, it was transferred to Pan Am 103A to London. At Heathrow, it was transferred again into container AVE4, 4,041, and loaded into the 747. Three flights, three baggage systems, no passenger. That last point is the reason people find this theory so hard to accept, and it's a legitimate objection, so let's take it seriously. For that plan to work, the bomber has to accept that his device will spend hours moving through three

separate airports without an owner, at the mercy of loading errors, mishandling, security screening, and simple bad luck. That's a lot of trust to place in the reliability of 1988 interline baggage handling. Investigators and journalists have argued about it ever since. The counterargument, and it's the one prosecutors have relied on for 35 years, is that unaccompanied interline bags were routinely carried in that era. There's a Pan Am internal Telex, which has come up again in the current Washington proceedings, instructing staff that where a passenger fails to show,

the baggage goes into the hold anyway. That was the industry norm. Bag reconciliation, the requirement that no bag flies without its passenger, is one of the security measures that exist today largely because of this case. The evidence for the Malta ingestion was principally a computer printout from Frankfurt.

baggage at Frankfurt was handled by an automated system that logged each item's movement between coded stations. A worker named Bogamira Iraq had preserved a printout from the evening of the 21st, and it showed an item from a tray coated to the arrival gate used by the Air Malta Flight, being routed to the gate for Pan Am 103A. That printout wasn't handed to investigators until months after the bombing. That's the case. One paper printout with a coated routing on it, and a shopkeeper's memory, and a fragment of circuit boards smaller than a fingernail.

I want to be fair to the investigators here because they get treated badly in a lot of the coverage. The forensic reconstruction was genuinely brilliant. The identification of the container, the explosive, the radio and the suitcase is solid work, and I don't think any serious person disputes it. The debris logging was disciplined and thorough beyond anything I've ever worked with. But the chain from that solid forensic core out to two named human beings is a different kind of chain. And it's made of weaker links. In November of 1991, almost three years to the day after the bombing,

the Lord Advocate of Scotland and the United States Department of Justice simultaneously announced indictments against McGrahy and Fama. Gaddafi refused to hand them over. He offered at various points to try them in Libya, or before an international tribunal, or in a neutral country under international law. Britain and the United States refused all of it and went to the United Nations. The Security Council passed a resolution in January 1992, demanding the surrender of the two men.

And when Libya didn't comply, it imposed sanctions in March. An air embargo, cutting off all international flights to and from Libya. In arms embargo, reductions in Libyan diplomatic staff abroad. The following year, the council, Council tightened it further with an asset freeze and a ban on equipment for Libya's oil sector. Those sanctions stayed in place for seven years. I have complicated feelings about what happened next, and I'll get to them. But the sequence itself is straightforward.

Libya's economy took serious damage. Gaddafi wanted the sanctions gone. Simultaneously, there was diplomatic movement driven substantially by Nelson Mandela, who'd raised the case publicly and kept raising it, and by the United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, and by Saudi and Egyptian intermediaries. The eventual deal was a compromise that had first been proposed years earlier by a Scottish law professor named Robert Black.

The two accused would be tried under Scots law by Scottish judges, applying Scottish rules of evidence and procedure, but the court would sit outside Scotland on neutral ground. And because a Scottish jury of 15 couldn't practically be assembled and sequestered abroad, and because the publicity had been so saturating, the trial would proceed without a jury before a bench of three senior judges. On the 5th of April 1999, McGrahy and FEMA were flown out of Tripoli and handed over. The United Nations suspended the sanctions the same day. The venue was Camp Zeist, a decommissioned United States Air Force Base near Utrecht in the Netherlands.

For the duration of the proceedings, the site was designated Scottish territory. A functioning Scottish High Court, complete with the accused in the dock and advocates and gowns, was assembled on a Dutch air base. The trial opened on the 3rd of May, 2000. It ran for the better part of nine months, 84 court days between the 3rd of May 2000 and the 31st of January 2001. 230 witnesses gave evidence, and the court worked through 621 exhibits. The largest of which was the reconstructed aircraft, which stayed at Farmer, Borough because it couldn't be moved. The judges were Lord Sutherland, presiding, with Lord

Coulsfield and Lord MacLean, and Lord Abernethy, sitting as a reserve. Both accused were charged with murder and with conspiracy. Two elements of the Crown case did badly. The first was a witness named Abdul Majid Jayaqa. Jaya was a Libyan intelligence officer who'd worked at Luca Airport in Malta and who'd been recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency as an informant in 1988. He'd been resettled in the United States. He gave evidence that placed McGrahy and FEMA in a conspiracy and described seeing explosives in FEMA's desk drawer. The defense sought disclosure of the agency's internal cables concerning Giacca.

The Crown initially resisted, then produced redacted versions, and then more complete versions after the judges pressed. What those cables revealed was that Giacca's American handlers had over a period of time come to regard him as a poor source who wasn't producing intelligence of value and who might be embellishing to keep his relationship and his stipend alive. The court's assessment of Giacca in the judgment was severe. They found him unreliable and they discarded essentially all of his evidence about the conspiracy. The second element was the identification.

Tony Gouchy had been interviewed by police many times over more than a decade. His description of the man who bought the clothes, given in 1989, was of someone around six feet tall and about 50 years old, of Libyan appearance. Abdelbassie al-Megra was 5 feet 8 and was 36 years old in December 1988. Gauchy was interviewed by police more than 20 times over 11 years and shown photographs on many of those occasions. In September 1989, he picked out a photograph of a different man and said the purchaser would have been 20 years older than the image.

In February 1991, he picked out a photograph of McGrahy while saying the man in it was considerably younger than the buyer. At an identification parade at Camp Zeist in 1999, and again in the courtroom, what he said in substance was that McGrahy resembled the man, not that he was the man. The trial judges knew all. of this. Their judgment says the identification, so far as it went, was reliable and should be treated

as a highly important element in the case. They did not explain how they reconciled the height and the age, and the date was a serious problem. Gouchy was certain about certain circumstantial details of the evening of the sale. He recalled that it had been raining. He recalled that the Christmas decorations in the street were not yet illuminated, meteorological evidence for Sleima, and evidence about when the town's Christmas lights were switched on, pointed toward one of two candidate dates, the 23rd of November, or the 7th of December. McGrahy was in Malta on the 7th of December. He was not in Malta on the 23rd of November. The trial court reasoned its way to the 7th. They acknowledged the difficulty. They noted the discrepancies in Gauchy's descriptions and the uncertainty

about the date, and they concluded that on balance the purchase took place on the 7th of December, and that Magrahi was the purchaser. On the 31st of January 2001, they delivered the verdict. Al-Amin Khalifa Fima, not guilty. The court found the evidence against him insufficient. There was no proof he'd put anything on any aircraft. Abdel Baset Ali Momad al-Meghrahi, guilty of the murder of 270 people.

Life imprisonment, with a minimum term initially set at 20 years, and later increased to 27. FEMA was acquitted because there was no evidence he introduced the suitcase. McGrahy was convicted on a case that required somebody to have introduced the suitcase at Luca. The court's written judgment acknowledges that it couldn't establish how the bag got into the system. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's in the judgment. The reaction was not what the prosecuting authorities expected.

Hans Cuckler, an Austrian professor of philosophy appointed by the U.S. United Nations Secretary General as an international observer at the trial, filed a report describing the verdict as inconsistent and expressing concern about the influence of intelligence services on the proceedings. He wasn't a fringe figure making noise. He was there in an official capacity at the invitation of the United Nations. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Jim Swire, who'd sat through nearly the whole trial in the public seats, collapsed in court when the verdict was read. He had come to Camp Zeist

believing that the man in the dock had murdered his daughter. He left believing the wrong man had been convicted, and he said so consistently ever since. McGrawi appealed in 2002. Five judges rejected it. Then, in 2003,

something happened that seemed at the time to settle the question. Libya wrote to the president of the United Nations Security Council formally accepting responsibility for the actions of its officials in the bomb, and agreed to pay compensation totaling $2.7 billion, structured as $10 million for each victim's family, paid in trenches tied to the lifting of sanctions and the removal of Libya from the American list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Accepting responsibility for the actions of officials is a carefully drafted phrase. It isn't an admission that the Libyan state ordered the bombing, and Libyan spokesman said so at the time, more than once and to considerable irritation in Washington and London. Gaddafi's own son later characterized the payment in an interview as the price of getting the sanctions removed. I'll give you my honest read, and it's an inference rather than a fact. A state that pays out $2.7 billion while insisting it did nothing is a state making a commercial decision.

That doesn't tell you whether Libya was guilty. Innocent governments have paid to make problems go away. and guilty ones have refused to pay out of pride. What it tells you is that by 2003, Gaddafi wanted back into the international system badly enough to write an enormous check, and that within a few years, he had British and American oil companies signing agreements in Tripoli. The sanctions came off. Libya gave up its chemical weapons and its nuclear program in December 2003. Tony Blair went to Tripoli and shook Gaddafi's hand in a tent in 2004.

and the man convicted of murdering 270 people sat in Greenock Prison in Scotland. In June of 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission finished a review of McGrahy's conviction that had taken almost four years and referred the case back to the Court of Appeal. That commission is a statutory body. Its job is to look at claimed miscarriages of justice and decide whether there's a real possibility a conviction wouldn't stand. It's not an advocacy group and it isn't staffed by campaigners.

It produced a document running to something like 800 pages, and it identified six grounds on which a miscarriage of justice might have occurred. First, that the verdict was unreasonable. Specifically that on the evidence actually led at trial, no reasonable court could have been satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that McGrahy bought the clothes in Malta because of the unresolved uncertainty about the date of purchase. Second, that evidence concerning Gauchy's identification of Megrahi had not been disclosed to the defense. Third, that evidence concerning the date of the purchase had not been disclosed. Fourth, that evidence concerning Gauchy's interest and financial reward had not been disclosed.

Fifth, that certain secret intelligence documents had not been disclosed, and their contents remain unknown to the public to this day. 6th, that new evidence concerning the purchase date existed which the court had never seen. Tony Gauchy and his brother Paul were paid by the United States government under the State Department's rewards for justice program. The figures that have entered the public record are $2 million to Tony and $1 million to Paul. The payments were made after the trial and after the first appeal. Rewards for information are a legitimate law enforcement tool. Paying a witness after the fact is not by itself corruption. But there's a rule, and it's a rule for a very good reason.

If a witness knows or hopes or has been given cause to believe that money may be available depending on how a case comes out, the defense has to be told. The jury, or in this case the bench, has to be able to weigh it. The commission found there was material in the police records indicating that Gauchy had an interest in reward money and that it wasn't disclosed to McGrahy's lawyers. The commission also found something else that I find harder to get past. The Crown had failed to disclose a statement and a police report, showing that Gauchy had been in possession of a photograph of McGrahy before he made an identification. If I'd taken a photo lineup and it later came out that the witness had already been looking at a picture of my suspect in a magazine at home,

that identification is finished. It doesn't matter whether the witness is honest. Memory contaminates. It's one of the most thoroughly documented findings in the whole of experimental psychology, and it was well understood in 1991, never mind 2000. The commission rejected other grounds. It considered and set aside arguments about the metallurgy of the timer fragment. It considered the Christmas Lights evidence and concluded that it wouldn't have assisted, largely because McGrahy's own lawyers had chosen not to use it at the first appeal. That's worth saying clearly,

because the campaign literature sometimes presents the commission as having endorsed every criticism ever made of the case. And it didn't. It endorsed six and rejected a great many. Six was more than enough. The appeal was on. And then, in 2009, McGrahy dropped it. In September of 2008, McGrahy was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer while in custody at Greenock. Two separate legal routes then existed for getting him out of Scotland. One was a prisoner transfer agreement that Britain had negotiated with Libya, which is the arrangement people refer to as the deal in the desert, signed after Blair's visits to Tripoli. The other was compassionate release, a provision of Scott's law that allows a prisoner with a short life expectancy to be released. There was a critical

procedural difference between the two. A prisoner can't be transferred under a transfer agreement while legal proceedings are outstanding. Compassionate release has no such requirement. On the 14th of August 2009, McGrahy formally abandoned his appeal. Six days later, on the 20th of August, the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny McCaskill, announced that he'd refused the prisoner transfer application and granted compassionate release on the basis of medical advice that McGrahy had roughly three months to live. The sequence is documented. What it means is argued. McGrahy and his lawyers have always maintained that abandoning the appeal was his own decision, made because he wanted to go home to die. Others, including people who supported him,

have said that the practical effect was to make the appeal disappear at precisely the moment when the Scottish legal establishment had the most to lose from it proceeding. I can't tell you which of those is true. What I can tell you, from 16 years of watching how criminal justice systems behave under institutional pressure, is that a system rarely has to conspire to produce a convenient outcome. It just has to be slow in some places and quick in others. The aircraft carrying McGrawi landed in Tripoli on the 20th of August, 2009, and he came down the steps into a crowd of young men waving flags.

Some of them were waving salt tires, the Scottish flag, which was a detail that went round the world within the hour. The reaction in the United States was fury. Families of the American victims had not been consulted in any meaningful way. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert Mueller, wrote a public letter to Mack Askell that was blunt to the point of being unprecedented in that kind of correspondence. And there was a further layer. In 2007, BP had signed a substantial exploration agreement with Libya

and had lobbied the British government about delays in ratifying the prisoner transfer agreement. Both BP and the British government denied that the compassionate release decision had anything to do with commercial interests, and the release was in fact made under the other legal route entirely by a devolved Scottish minister rather than by London. A United States Senate committee investigated. No evidence emerged that the Scottish decision was purchased, but the timing sat badly. with people, and I understand why. The three-month prognosis turned out to be wrong. McGrawi lived for another two years and nine months. He died in Tripoli on the 20th of May, 2012, age 60, maintaining his innocence. By then Gaddafi had been dead for seven months,

killed in October 2011 during the uprising that ended his rule. In March of 2020, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the conviction back to the the appeal court a second time on an application brought by McGrahy's widow Aisha and his son, Ali, supported by Jim Swire and John Mosey and a number of British victims' families. This time the referral was narrow. Two grounds that the verdict was unreasonable in light of the quality of Gauchy's evidence, and that non-disclosure of certain material had deprived McGrahy of a fair trial. The appeal was heard in November 2020, on the 15th of January,

2021, five judges of the High Court of Justiciary refused it on both grounds. The court held that the trial judges had been entitled to reach the conclusions they did on Gauchy, and that the undisclosed material would not have made a real difference to the outcome. An application to take the case to the United Kingdom Supreme Court was also refused. So the conviction stands. Legally, that's where we are. Abdel Baset al-Migrahi is, in the eyes of Scots law, the man who murdered 270 people, and the courts have now rejected challenges to that finding three

times. That's the legal position. It is not the same thing as the factual position, and anybody who tells you otherwise is either being lazy or selling something. So let's go through what actually sits unresolved, because there's a lot of noise in this area, and I want to separate the substantial objections from the nonsense. Start with Heathrow. Shortly after midnight on the 24th, of December, 1988, about 18 hours before Pan Am 103 departed, a security guard named Ray Manley found that the padlock on a door in Terminal 3 had been cut through, as though with bolt cutters. The door was one of the points separating the landside part of the terminal from the airside baggage area. Manley reported it to his night duty officer and recorded it in the logbook.

The trial court at Camp Zeist never heard about it. It surfaced publicly in a news in September 2001, months after the verdict. It was heard at the 2002 appeal, where Manley gave evidence in person. The court rejected it as a basis for overturning the conviction. The Crown's argument was that nothing tied the broken padlock to any suitcase, that the doors had been strengthened after the incident, that staff with passes could go airside without being searched anyway, and that there were three Pan Am flights to New York out of Heathrow that day rather than one. That's a legally coherent answer. It's also, from an investigative

standpoint, deeply unsatisfying. A cut padlock on a door leading airside at the departure airport on the day of the bombing is exactly the kind of thing that ought to have been examined exhaustively and put in front of the court. It wasn't. And the reason it wasn't is that the investigation had already committed to Malta. Then there's John Bedford. Bedford was a Heathrow baggage handler who was working container AVE 4,041 on the afternoon of the 21st. In his statement, given very early in the investigation, he said that he'd gone for a tea break and that when he came back, there were two additional suitcases in the container that he hadn't loaded. He described one of them as a brown or maroon hardshell case. The Frankfurt feeder flight, 103A, had not yet landed at Heathrow when

Bedford said he saw those cases. The trial court considered Bedford's evidence and worked around it, concluding that the position of those bags in the container was not consistent with the reconstructed position of the explosion, which they placed higher and further outboard. That's a real technical argument and it's not obviously wrong. But it depends entirely on the accuracy of a reconstruction of the position of a suitcase inside a container that no longer exists, derived from blast damage patterns. If Bedford's brown hard shell case was the bomb bag, then the entire, Malta chain is unnecessary, and the whole case against McGrahy loses its foundation,

because the clothing in Mary's house is the only thing tying him to it. Then there's the fragment. PT35. B is the single most contested object in modern British criminal justice. Two lines of objection have real substance. The first is metallurgical. Analysis has indicated that the circuitry on the fragment was coated in pure tin, while the board's Mibo manufactured and supplied to

Libya, used a tin lead alloy. If that difference is real and material, the fragment did not come from one of the 20-timers sold to Libya. Defenders of the conviction argued that the coding could have been altered by the heat and chemistry of the explosion, and that argument was examined by the Review Commission, which decided it didn't establish a miscarriage of justice. The second concerns handling and provenance. There are documented alterations in the forensic paperwork relating to the fragment and its associated exhibit, including a changed label and pages in the examiner's notes that don't sit comfortably in sequence. There's also the matter of a mebo engineer named Ulrich Lumpert, who gave evidence identifying the fragment at trial, and who in

2007 swore an affidavit, claiming he'd removed a prototype board from the company and handed it to an official investigating the case. Lumpert's affidavit was subsequently discredited. and he was convicted in Switzerland of making a false statement. Balea, the Mibo co-owner, has made a long series of claims over the years, some of which have shifted and contradicted each other, and he is not a witness anyone should build a conclusion on. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

That's the honest summary of the fragment controversy. There are real anomalies in the paperwork. There are unreliable people making dramatic claims about it. both things are true at once, and the presence of the second doesn't dissolve the first. There's also a broader problem with the forensic institution involved. The Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment Scientists who worked this case had been involved in earlier prosecutions in Britain that were later overturned as miscarriages of justice, and Alan Faraday in particular gave evidence in cases where convictions were subsequently quashed on appeal

with criticism of the scientific evidence. On the American side, a Department of Justice Inspector General Review of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory in 1997 was critical of practices in the explosives unit and named Thomas Thurman, among those whose work was reviewed. Thurman was reassigned out of the laboratory.

None of that proves anything was falsified in the Lockerbie case. It does mean that the forensic evidence in this case came out of institutions that were, in the same period, producing work that courts later found unreliable. That's a fact about the environment, and it belongs in the assessment. Now, the theories that don't hold up, the claim that Khalid Jafar was a drug courier whose luggage was swapped for a bomb under the protection of an American intelligence operation, which originated substantially in a report prepared for Pan Am's insurers by an investigator named Juval Aviv, has never been supported by evidence.

The insurers were obviously an interested party in litigation over whether Pan Am was liable for security failures. The report's specific claims were examined and not substantiated. The claim that the Central Intelligence Agency officers aboard were targeted to silence them about hostage negotiations in Lebanon, rests entirely on the coincidence of their presence. Four intelligence and security personnel traveling on the same aircraft is unusual. but Pan Am 103 was a heavily used route out of Europe four days before Christmas. The claim that men in dark suits were seen removing items from the wreckage in the first hours has circulated for decades, largely from one or two accounts, and has never been substantiated

by anyone with a documented role at the scene. I don't dismiss these because they're uncomfortable. I dismiss them because they don't have evidence behind them, and this case is difficult enough without them. Every hour spent on the unsupported version is an hour not spent on the padlock at Terminal 3, which is documented, and which nobody has ever adequately explained. The consequences that did stick were in aviation security. The President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism chaired by Anne McLaughlin Coralogos reported in May 1990. It concluded that the American Civil Aviation Security System was seriously flawed. and that Pan Am security at Frankfurt

had failed to meet requirements. Congress passed the Aviation Security Improvement Act later that year. The changes that came out of it are the reason your checked bag doesn't fly without you. Positive passenger bag matching. The requirement that a hold bag be removed if its passenger doesn't board

went from an aspiration to a rule. Explosive detection screening for hold baggage was mandated and developed. Security responsibilities that had been left to airlines began moving to governments. Pan American World Airways did not survive. A New York jury found in July 1992 that the airline had been guilty of willful misconduct in its security procedures, which stripped away the liability limits it would otherwise have enjoyed. The airline had already ceased operations in December 1991, almost exactly three years after Lockerbie. The family's

organized. Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 became a persistent, informed, extremely well-briefed lobbying presence in Washington, and their British counterparts did the same in London. They're the reason the President's Commission existed. Bert Ammerman, whose brother Tom died on the flight, and Paul Hudson, whose 16-year-old daughter Melina died, and Stephanie Bernstein, and Jim Swire, and a good many others, spent decades on this. In America, they mostly pushed for accountability and pursuit. In Britain, a substantial number of them pushed for an independent inquiry into whether the conviction was sound.

Those two positions have often been in direct tension, and the families have not always been kind to one another about it. That tension is real. It's decades old, and it hasn't resolved. Which brings us to a courtroom in Washington, where this story is currently sitting. In 2011, as Gaddafi's government collapsed, Libyan records and Libyan officials became available in a way they hadn't been for 40 years. Scottish and American investigators went to Tripoli.

In 2012, a Libyan police officer identified in American court transcripts only as Jamal, interviewed a prisoner at a Libyan detention facility about a series of matters. According to the officer's account, the prisoner volunteered something he hadn't been asked about. The prisoner was Abu Agila Muhammad Masoud Kair al-Marimi, generally referred to as Masoud. Born in Tunisia, a Libyan national, and by the account given to American authorities, a technical specialist with Libyan intelligence.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's criminal complaint, which was made public in December 2020, Massoud admitted a series of things, that he'd worked for the Libyan Intelligence Service, that he'd built the device that brought down Pan Am 103, packing it into a brown Samsonite suitcase, along with clothing he'd purchased, that he'd set the timer for 11 hours,

that he'd traveled to Malta with the case and handed it to FEMA at Luka Airport, and that FEMA put it on to the conveyor, that he'd met with Magrahi in Malta, that the operation had been ordered by senior Libyan intelligence officials, and that he was thanked afterwards by Gaddafi personally. He is also alleged to have admitted building the device used in the La Belle Discotheque bombing in West Berlin in April 1986. The officer said he kept his written record of the interview at home for around three years before handing it to a senior Libyan official in 2015.

That's the year Scottish and American prosecutors first publicly named Massoud as a suspect. In December 2020, the American Attorney General, William Barr, announced charges as a suspect. against Massoud. Barr had been acting Attorney General on the 14th of November 1991, and it was Barr who stood up and announced the original indictments against Magrahi and FEMA. In December 2022, Massoud was taken from his home in Tripoli by an armed militia and delivered into American custody. He pleaded not guilty in February 2023. And here's where it stands as of the summer of 2006. Massoud is in his mid-70s, in poor. health and his trial has been postponed twice first from May 2025 and then from

April of this year jury selection in the district court for the District of Columbia is currently scheduled for the last week of August the central pretrial fight has been over the confession Massoud's court-appointed lawyers have moved to suppress it their argument is that he was held in communicato in a Libyan detention system with a documented record of abuse that masked men threatened him and his family, and that he was assaulted and coerced into saying what his captors wanted to hear. Prosecutors say the statement was given voluntarily, that the facility was well run, that the prisoner showed no signs of mistreatment, and that he consented to be interviewed.

At a hearing in February of this year, the Libyan officer who took the confession gave evidence over two days and was cross-examined. The defense pressed him on his record-keeping, on the conditions at the facility, and on the fact that there is no record. He testified that he'd tried to record the interview on an older phone and that the data was lost. Judge Dabney Friedrich told the court she needed more time and had further questions before ruling on admissibility. At a hearing in July, the argument moved to a Pan Am internal telex about unaccompanied baggage. The judge ruled that part of it could go before the jury and part could not. Families have been attending.

Stephanie Bernstein, whose husband Michael died on the flight, was in the room in February reading through the transcripts page by page. I want to point out what's happening here because it's genuinely unusual. The American government's case against Massoud rests substantially on a confession obtained by a Libyan police officer in a Libyan detention facility, unrecorded, from a prisoner held without counsel, in a country that had just come out of a civil war. In any ordinary prosecution, that's a confession a defense lawyer dreams about attacking.

and the corroborating architecture around it is the Malta Chain, the clothing, the timer, the inner line route, all of which has been under sustained attack for a quarter of a century. If the confession is excluded, I have real difficulty seeing how this prosecution succeeds. If it's admitted, then a jury of ordinary Americans will be asked to decide in 2006 what happened at Luca Airport in December 1988, based on documents older than most, of them. I think the forensic core of the Lockerbie investigation is sound. A device using around 400 grams of Semtex concealed in a Toshiba RT-Dash, SF-16 radio cassette player, inside a brown hard-shell Samsonite suitcase, detonated inside container AVE4,

4,041 in the forward hold. That is not seriously in dispute and the evidence for it is physical and reproducible. I think the case that the suitcase originates originated in Malta is possible and unproven. It rests on a computer printout that surfaced months late and on clothing that was undoubtedly bought in Sliyama by somebody. I think the identification of Abdel Baza al-Megrahi as the purchaser of that clothing does not meet the standard I'd want before convicting a man of 270 murders. A witness who described a man at least four inches taller and about 14 years older than the accused, who'd seen photographs before identifying him, who was interviewed more than 20 times over 11 years, and who received $2 million afterwards,

is not a foundation you build a life sentence on. I don't know whether Libya did it. There's a serious body of evidence pointing at Tripoli, including Libya's own conduct, and if it's admitted, and if it's true, Massoud's account. There's also a serious body of evidence pointing at Tehran and Ahmed Gibral's general command, including a matching bomb design in the right country at the right time and a motive built out of 290 dead Iranians. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. Intelligence services subcontract. What I'm confident about is narrower and harder. Somewhere between the 20th and the 21st of December 1988, a suitcase with a bomb in it entered the interline baggage system, and the system carried it. Nobody stopped it, because in 1988,

nothing in that system was designed to stop it. The bag didn't need a pass-a-person. passenger. Nobody checked. There's a stone memorial standing on a lawn on Sherwood Crescent now, surrounded by gravel, under a single tree. The houses that were vaporized were never rebuilt on the same footprint. If you drive through Lockerbie today, you'll pass a quiet residential street with a gap in it and a garden where number 13, 14, 15, and 16 used to be. At Dreyfesdale Cemetery, just outside the town, there's a garden of remembrance with all 270 names on it. At Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, there's a cairn built out of 270 blocks of Scottish sandstone, quarried near Lockerby, given to the United States by the people of Scotland.

Syracuse University awards 35 remembrance scholarships every year, one for each of its students who died, and it brings two pupils from Lockerby Academy to New York on scholarship annually. That exchange has been running for more than 30 years. The Lockerbie students who go now weren't born when it happened. Neither were most of the Syracuse students who select them. Stephen Flanagan, the boy who was in a neighbor's garage assembling his sister's bicycle, received a settlement from Pan Am, along with his older brother David. David had moved out of the family home shortly before the bombing after falling out with his parents, which is why he was alive. He died in Thailand in 1993. Stephen moved around a lot,

through towns and jobs and relationships, and was struck by a train on a railway line in Wiltshire in 2000, at the age of 26, while the trial of the men accused of killing his family was underway at Camp Zeist. He never heard the verdict. Tony Gauchy died in Malta in October 2016. He never gave a public account of the reward money, and he was never cross-examined about it, because it wasn't disclosed until after his evidence was finished, and the piece of circuit board is still in an evidence store in Scotland. That's what I keep coming back to. Not the politics, not the sanctions, not the tent in Tripoli. A fragment of green fiberglass and copper about the size of a thumbnail, recovered from a fold of aluminum in a wrecked baggage container in January 1989,

which has carried the entire weight of the largest murder investigation Britain has ever run. Three courts have relied on it. Two commissions have examined it. Metallurgists have argued about the tin on its tracks for 20 years. A man died in Tripoli insisting it didn't convict him fairly, and another man will sit in a Washington courtroom this August, and wait to find out whether a jury will ever hear about it. Two hundred and seventy people were killed on the 21st of December, 1988, and after 37 years, four million recovered fragments, one trial, three appeals, two commissions of review, two point seven billion dollars, and one conviction. The honest answer to the question of who ordered it is still a piece of circuit board and an argument about a shopkeeper's memory of the rain.