Doomed to Fail - Ep 161: Flight to Oblivion - The Lockerbie Bombing

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

Finish up the year with us by talking about the Christmastime tragedy of the Lockerbie bombing. We'll talk about the PanAm flight, where it started, where it was headed, and what happened when a suitcase in the cargo hold exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. We'll talk suspects, pay-offs, and conspiracy theories. Thank you for listening to our little show this year!! We will see you in 2025! Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. All righty, Taylor. Welcome back. How are you doing today? Good.

Hang it in there. You look so different without your Santa costume. I did. My cheeks are very rosy, though. They're very rosy. That's good for me. I think it's just a zoom filters, though. And I have my ring light on because by the time it's like 2.30 in here,

it's like pitch black in my office because I live next to a mountain and the sun goes down. It's like behind the mountain and I'm like, it's so dark. So I have to like put on every light I have including my ring light. Otherwise, it's just literally, really dark in here. So I don't have any lights in here and it actually is dark in here right now. Like it's in like it's night here. But I'm still lit up because I think that I have so many damn screens and monitors. staring at me that it lights me up like

a little Christmas tree. That's true. I wouldn't be able to tell. There you go. Yeah. So it works. Sweet. Do you want to introduce us? Oh yeah. Hi. Everyone. Welcome to Duned to Fail. We're the podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week every week. And I'm Taylor joined by Fars and we're a week away from Christmas. We're a week away from Christmas. And we are going to do another December story today.

And actually, Taylor, I didn't anticipate this, but we actually had. have like another really strong overlap between our stories. Oh, hell me. So I'm going to be telling a story about an event that occurred on December 21st, 1988. We are coming up to actually, by the time you listen to this, it'll probably be the 36th anniversary of this event. And I found it super interesting because it has to do with terrorism,

but it doesn't occur in the way that we think about modern terror. or the reasons that we think about for modern terrorism. So that's why I thought it was an interesting story. Cool. So I'm going to be discussing the Lockerbie bombing. I'm going to be going over how it happened, what officials did or didn't know beforehand, who did it, why in the aftermath? You know this one, right?

Yeah, I do. I have so much plane anxiety that I feel like I was going to do another plane crash and I was like, I can't. And then I appreciate you this for a car on a plane. Just keep going. Everything's fine. Contributing to your anxiety. It is what it is.

So Lockerbie, the name refers to the city in Scotland where the debris field of this crashes. So that's what we're referring to with Lockerbie. Realistically, this is a flight called Pan Am 103. Obviously, Pan Am doesn't exist anymore. But at the time, they were running routes between Frankfurt, Germany, to London Heathrow, to JFK in New York, ending in Michigan, Detroit, Michigan, which was the path for Pan Am 103. That's what it was intended to do. The plane involved in the bombing was a Boeing 747, so that's the double-decker, the big one. And it carried 243 passengers and 16 crew for 259 people in total.

This is interesting. I did not know this, but when you look at a flight like American Airlines 1015 or Pan Am 103, whatever it is, that actually doesn't mean it's like one plane doing the whole thing. That's just like the flight route. did you know that so the flight number yeah it's not the same flight number every time that plane goes well i assume that but well i assume that like if you're flight whatever then like you're it's one plane doing

that route and then back on a different flight number doing the opposite route that's where i assumed okay but apparently in this case so the flight that started out again it starts out in frankford germany to london heathrow that was a 727 the flight number then gets a fixed to a 747 in london to pick up the transatlantic leg which i guess makes sense right because okay frankford to london is easier than across the atlantic so you want a big jet for that got it okay yeah that makes sense just learning so wait wait i'm sorry I say it again. So, but so it's still called the same flight number, even though they change flights.

They change planes. Yeah, but the same flight number. Got it. Because the flight number is the journey. It's a journey, yeah. Okay. Back aboard. I learned it quite a bit, actually, about how.

No, I'm excited. Okay, I get it. Thank you. So on the day of, again, the 727 lands from Frankfurt, Germany, the passengers crew and luggage intended for the Atlantic leg of the flight moves over to the 747, as do all the new pastures had picked up in London and the plane takes off at 6.25 p.m. local time at around 702 p.m. air traffic controllers over Scotland, or in Scotland, noted that the cockpit was non-responsive and then they picked up five radar signatures where the plane should have been fanning in different directions.

So moments later, the plane wreckage and the bodies of its pastures come raining down primarily over Lockerby, Scotland. The entire wreckage site was actually spread over 845 square. miles. Whoa. Crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. So what happened was, what happened to the plane was that was a detonation of a

Semtex plastic explosive bomb that was disguised as a Toshiba cassette playing radio. Hilariously, 80s of them. Yeah, very 80s, yeah. So the bomb contained a barometric pressure switch, which was set to explode once the pressure switch reached 31,000 feet in altitude. I was going to ask how high it was. There it is. And then the bomb was contained inside of a Samsonite suitcase along with clothes.

So despite what I kind of assumed... Wait, was it checked? It was. That is all the story. Oh, okay, great. I can't wait. Sorry. So despite what I kind of assumed about how luggage is stored, they apparently don't just throw the luggage into the storage compartment under the plane, which is kind of what I thought they did.

Kind of like in the trunk, you just throw stuff in there. They use these large aluminum containers. that are filled with luggage then rolled into a place into the plane. I think sounds like I guess. Within one of these containers was the suitcase containing this cassette player containing the bomb. So where it is located would have been closer to the bottom part of the storage container near the front of the plane slightly behind the first class cabin. When it blew, it created a 20 inch hole in the plane. And during investigation, they reconstructed pretty much like the entire plane.

If you look at it, it looks like just a tin can that was just like torn to shreds is what it kind of looked like. Yeah. And what happened was they discovered that this hole that this 20 inch hole of the plane, that the bomb created in the plane, it set off a chain reaction essentially. So it was very, it was very well played. to do the kind of damage it was intended to do but it was possible that it would not have done what it ended up doing if it was placed deeper inside the plane or further in the back

where it was placed was particularly sensitive so no had any control over that that just because of accident yeah total accident so the whole resulted in rapid depressurization which resulted in dramatic structural damage to the plane such that the cockpit from the cockpit back to the first class cabin completely ripped off the plane immediately.

The wings were sheared off and the rest of the fuselage started breaking apart as it started falling. The good news of this is for the front half of the plane that detached, anyone in that section either died immediately or had no clue what happened because the G forces were so extreme

it would have incapacitated any human. The back half, it wasn't as obvious and clean. The people who were seated with their seat belts on, they probably would have survived at least a few seconds. They would have known what was going on. So they would have been rendered unconscious, mostly because

of the lack of oxygen at 31,000 feet. The fact that the weather was immediately negative 70 degrees inside, the temperature was negative 70 degrees inside, plus they're being whipped around and 500 mile per hour winds. They would have, they would have like gone out relatively quickly. There is some,

they did find that it is presumed some people survived all the way to the ground but it was like impossible they were conscious yeah so that's good yeah exactly so what's the play made impact its wings which is where all the fuel is carried landed in a neighborhood and caused a massive fireball it killed another 11 people in lockerby mostly people were just like in their homes yeah so by all accounts governments and airlines actually knew that there was an impending threat this is like 9-11 all over again So 16 days before the explosion, someone called a U.S. embassy saying that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the U.S. will be blown up in the next two weeks by a Palestinian freedom group named Abu Nadal organization.

Okay. Well, that sounds pretty fucking specific. Right. Right. Also, extremist members of the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization themselves also warned that they might launch a terror attack, mostly because the U.S. and the PLO were, well, the leadership of the PLO were negotiating peace into like extremists. They were like, no peace, death to everyone. You know what I mean? Like, it was one of those days. Several problems here.

On number one, the warning 16 days before the attack was issued by the U.S. government to every airline. and unfortunately in this case it was found the day after the bombing by a pan and employee like under a stack of papers like nobody read it nobody knew it was there oh my god and this is even worse the security screener who had x-rayed

the suitcase in Frankfurt had never heard of semtext or knew what it was until about 11 months after the 11 months after the accident wait so why didn't they like expedited it to panium because i said panium i don't know maybe it was just like uh well we it's not a hundred percent credible it actually went to every airline so panam no i know but like if i could make sure that panam heard yeah yeah maybe they heard and just didn't get passed down it didn't go i didn't go into too much detail about that but yeah i mean they apparently

had it and but also sort of kind of did it totally matter because the security screener didn't know what explosives were? Yeah, I mean, yes. Sounds like that's actually the last part of this outline, this section, the outline I wrote down was like, even if they had the paperboard, it probably wouldn't have been useful

because they wouldn't have been able to find the bomb because they wouldn't have been able to identify that. Right, they wouldn't have known what it was. Anyway, yeah. So how'd the bag get on the flight? So this is the other thing I learned about air travel. So there's a concept amongst airlines called interlining, which is,

kind of like this accord and agreement between carriers on how they handle each other's customers, luggage, whatever, doing layovers and transfers. It's like a agreement that they're going to do right by each other, essentially. So in the case of baggage interlining,

if luggage is checked in one location and screen there, it is typically not subject to further screening by the receiving airline. I feel like that makes sense. Because they assume that it's in like a bubble of protection. Sort of. Not always. ways though because because it depends on whether it is a low risk airport and city that they're

going into or out of and whether it's a low risk carrier i.e. like it's not like you know some carrier in a country like I'm trying to think of like an example it's not Afghanistan air flying into New York City you know what I mean like yeah in some cases they are subject to additional screening but not in this case in the case of this suitcase it was checked by Air Malta from a Malta airport in Frankfurt or sorry to Frankfurt okay that was the origination point so who did this so investigators piece the other that clothes were the closest to so sorry they the messengers piece the other what clothes were the closest to the bomb and most likely inside of the suitcase and were able to identify the brand was yorky is the name of it and they found a found a made in quote tag

stating that an item in the suitcase was made in Malta kind of piecing this together they tracked down Yorkie clothing and they provide them samples of trousers that were recovered and they were able to say they could determine what store it was likely sold it in the past couple weeks which is like kind of nuts to me so they settled on this one store in Malta called Mary's house and talked to the owner a guy named Tony Gauchy

and Tony would tell investigators that he sold the trousers two weeks ago to a man who looked Libyan, spoke Arabic, English, and Maltese, and who didn't particularly care what he was buying, what size they were, any of that stuff. Tony also described him buying other items

that investigators knew were also in that suitcase. So, please... I'm sorry, I just have a thought. I feel like wouldn't you... Like, why would you have to buy new clothes for that? I guess you don't want them to have need to do with you?

I don't know. That's a good point. Because I feel like you could just like shove your old clothes and they're like literally who cares what's in there. Yeah, they don't have DNA back then, I don't think. Like they... Yeah. Yeah, weird. I never thought about that. Yeah. So police would come up with a composite sketch with this customer using Tony's description. They would also discover that on the same day in time that the suitcase was checked at the

Malta Airport, a flight was leaving there for Tripoli with a man named Abdel Bissette, Al McGrahi and he was on board and he also was using a false passport which is different than a fake passport I'll explain that here in a minute McGrahi fit the description given by Tony of the customer in his shop and so in addition of that

the timer that was used for the detonator was linked to a Swiss company that made timers exclusively for use by Libyan intelligence and McGrawi was a known Libyan intelligence officer this is kind of like piecing this thing together also as an aside in March of 1990

the Czech president a guy named Baklav Havel disclosed that they had also provided a ton of Semtex explosive plastic to the government of Libya so it was all kind of honing it on Libya essentially yeah so eventually McRahi and an accomplice a guy named Kamin FEMA were arrested and tried for the bombing. FEMA, the accomplice was acquitted for a lack of evidence,

but McGrahy was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in Scotland. This is all going on in Scotland. Remarkably, eight and a half years into his sentence, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and Scotland released him on grounds of compassionate release. And in August of 2009, he was flown back to Libya on Murmard Gaddafi's personal jet. remember that's wild wild he would undergo medical treatment first cancer he would ultimately die

on may 20th of 2012 Obama came out and was like this is insane I can't believe you guys are doing this like why are you doing this yeah so he actually claimed innocence on his part and he did the oj thing of saying he's going to catch the real culport one day his family actually continued that after his death but that being said he might actually be innocent because under what circumstance would you release a guy who had killed nearly 260 people, right? Like, it makes no sense why they would, why they did this. Yeah. There's some other things I learned that don't really prove that he didn't do it, but at least

like it kind of cast doubt on whether he did or not. One thing I read is that a lot was made of him using that false passport in Malta. So a fake passport is literally a fake passport. Like it's just, is it is a bullshit that you print yourself or have printed for you. A fake false passport is a real passport that is issued. by a country. So a lot of times intelligence agencies will issue false passports for obvious reasons to conceal the identity of what people are doing when they're traveling for official government business, right? So apparently at this time, so a little bit, a little bit of

background, Libya is like a Muslim country and it's not known for decadence or like retuitous sexual things. It's not known for that. Malta was. Malta was considered kind of like a decadent place like a sexy kind of a place and this guy McRahey was buried and they were religious and he knew he was going to go to Malta and some of the arguments I read about this were he used his false passport which he shouldn't have used if he's flying for personal reasons because he was leaving his real passport at home so his wife doesn't think that he's going to Malta to do probably cheating stuff there is like the argument sure the other thing I read was about this Tony Gouchy guy, the shop owner,

and there was some inconsistencies with his story. He had said, so I guess in Malta, it's like, I mean, I guess like any other city here in the U.S., this all happened in December. And when investigators had asked him,

if like they were trying to get a timing of this thing, they're like, your memory's probably not 100%. Let's figure out what some markers are that we can kind of base on. Yeah, I feel like his stuff was like, how did you know that guy spoke three languages?

That's weird, right? I thought about that too. That's super weird. Like I feel that never, that doesn't come up. with and when I'm selling someone pants like if I'm in Malta a Maltese and some guy's speaking Maltese to me maybe at most he gets a phone call and he takes it in Arabic or in English but like also he wouldn't take a phone call because he has no cell phone right he's like yeah exactly

that's just like a weird you know that's a weirdly specific thing to know but here's the thing so what he said as investors are trying to like get him to like give us some details that we can hone in on timing the city government in in this part of Malta they do want to much of Christmas lighting around town, which is like any city does. And he specifically said when this guy was in his store to buy clothes, there was no Christmas lights. They go back, they check the records. They realize that the guy, so they go back to check that the date the lights go on, go up. Like the city has records of when they start putting lights up, when the lights go on and all that stuff. This guy was for sure in Malta on this false passport

after the Christmas lights were strung up. So they know for sure your memory's not, it's hazy or wrong on this piece. He apparently also had seen a photo of McRahey in a magazine after the bombing. And that was done. And then days later he had to positively identify him like in the lineup.

And so that was another piece of it. Was he supposed, was that guy supposed to be on that flight? no no but how did his luggage get on it that's so damn I wish I did I should have honed it on that Taylor I did not hone it on that

but like he was it was the only unaccompanied piece of luggage on that flight and why was that even a thing I don't know unless it was like maybe it could have been like a what's it called like a commercial

thing where it's like just send this stuff on my like yeah I mean my like he's like sending it because I know my luggage is definitely traveled without me before, you know, but it was like a mistake. Yeah, on purpose.

That happened to me in Mexico City. Like, I had to go there. I thought like just happened to you, right? Yeah, literally like two months ago. I've got stressed. So that was the other thing was that he'd seen a photo of this guy in the magazine as people were like throwing around ideas of who could have done this. After the trial, the Scottish official who oversaw the case called board advocate,

which like, man, that is so over the top. but kind of cool. That person described him as, quote, an apple short of a picnic. And in an overlap between our stories, he also received from the U.S. Department of Justice an award for providing testimony and evidence against McRahy. Can you guess how much money he got?

$85,000. At that time, in the late 1980s, early 1990s, he got $4 million. to do the testimony. I was kind of mentioning, I was kind of mentioning rewards because, like, whoever turned that guy in this week is not going to get that award, the reward, you know?

Yeah. Like, I feel like no one ever really gets them. So, like, that's suspicious AF. Yeah, he got a crazy award from the U.S. government. Wild. That was, again, like, I don't know what that is. It's probably got to be somewhere in, like, the $6, $7 million range,

maybe even higher than that today. That's why. wild and he's like living in malta like that's he's probably the richest guy in malta because of that yeah dude and frankly on appeal when marahi was running his appeals before he got released um the scottish version of the supreme court they have over there they said the reward payment could constitute a miscarriage of justice so like they called that i was like this was like gratuitously over the top it would it would taint anybody's perspective of anything yeah i mean the crime

is horrific you know like what was it like I was looking up 270 people die like terrible but like yeah no

that's weird Taylor for $4 million I would tell anybody that you did whatever crime they told me 100% like that guy

suspicious suspicious yeah I wouldn't even blame you I wouldn't like if you did that to me I'd be like yeah

yeah I'm in jail so So regardless, the one thing that we do know, though, is that Libya was at fault for this. The reason being is that Omar Gaddafi in 2003 literally stated that they were responsible for this. And they paid out some fines to people. But there's some, like, weirdness around that, too, because the reasoning behind why they would have done this is also a little bit suspicious. We don't know for sure why they would have done this. There's some guesses that the U.S. intelligence community has.

So one is that it is presumed that this has something to do with airstrikes. The U.S. launched in Tripoli and Benghazi in response to an attack in Berlin performed by Libya that killed two U.S. soldiers. Also, that airstrikes specifically targeted Gaddafi himself. Like, they were trying to kill him with airstrikes, which was like crazy to think about right now. Yeah. But it was also, it also could have been meant to serve as kind of like a middle finger to Western. powers of the time because around this time is when the IRA, the Irish Republican Army was actively fighting in the UK and ended up with a establishment of North Ireland. And

the PLO were also highly active in militant combat. And it was assumed Gaddafi just wanted to maybe demonstrate that they have capacity to wage guerrilla war on the West as well. And this was like a way to do that. Yeah. It reminded me when you said Libyans, the Libyans were like in Remember back to the future when he's trying to do it? Like that was like a big thing. That was like 85. So like yeah, that's like obviously happening.

That scene, that scene like I saw that way too young. I saw that way. I saw that and was like it just it's, I had nightmares forever about how Doc was killed. Well, he wasn't killed, but you know. Yeah, yeah,

no you know what you mean. So there was also another situation which I never knew about, which is absolutely crazy. The U.S. under Ronald Reagan, this is presumed accidentally, but we don't. I don't know, obviously. They shot down an Iranian passenger plane

killing 290 people. And they say it was an accident. I didn't go to one of the weeds on that one, but they say it was an accident. Iran obviously feels differently. This is definitely, and we didn't start the fire, because there's definitely terror on the airlines. It's like a whole thing.

Great. We can connect. Thank God we can connect that dot. And the other idea was that this could have been, Lockerbie could have been a way for Gaddafi to show, like, solidarity to Iran to, like, gain allegiance there due to a number of sanctions being passed by the U.S. That's kind of the whole story. It, yeah, it's, it's, it's a weird one because we don't have any thousand percent proof of who did it or. Do they have, like, why would this guy have done it?

Just because he was like, because yeah, because he was, he was, he's a living. be an intelligence officer working for the government and if Gaddafi wanted him to do it then he did it that's kind of the idea so if it wasn't him it was somebody else who had like the same job probably yeah yeah again I obviously didn't do by himself no he definitely didn't do by himself I I so the Scottish government um in the aftermath of this it seems like there's probably been more focus on the potential that he didn't do it

because the $4 million payout in the fact that his testimony was the key biggest thing there's a lot of their details here I kind of left out which is like his description also really didn't fit this guy like yeah he described a Middle Eastern guy

but he also described the guy who was like in his 50s and this guy was like 30 when this happened and he described him as having like a very very abnormally large head and the guy was like normal looking like there's there's just like things that are in discrepancy but also like my if you would ask you what I had for dinner five nights ago I don't know but you know totally witness testimony is wild like you can't remember anything but which is why you probably shouldn't incentivize it with a four million dollar bounty right like yeah you'd say

anything at that point and like are you putting yourself in any danger by turning that guy in or they just like need us need you to do it to get it over with no i think this guy yeah i don't think he was in any danger i think you're just like cool he lives in multily who cares yeah that sounds nice there it does sound nice there um but yeah that was the worst air disaster in scottish history um and until tennarief it was the deadliest involving just like planes wow yeah that's wild poor people or lockerby they didn't deserve that they didn't were even involved

like raining down on their town that was the other thing that was interesting it reminded me a lot of like the edgine story which is like in in small towns when crazy things like this happen it's like all you're all you have well there's no resource for it like you don't have the resource like wait so you're telling me in Scotland who has

zero aviation history I got to rebuild from scratch a blown apart 747 like it's a you know the other governments have to get involved in this kind of stuff also because of the footprint of the wreckage over 800 miles square miles like it was way beyond their own individual resources to be able to collect all this stuff totally but you can see patients of it you can see the reconstruction and it's like crazy how how much they put together I know that's a lot yeah yeah yeah So, yeah, that's my story this week. I thought it was kind of interesting.

It was originally I'd ask Chachapitia to come up with disaster stories for Christmas or Christmas Eve. And he gave me this. And I was already like, 90% done with the research. I was like, wait, I never wrote down the date of this. I was like December 21st. I was like, shit. Oh, well.

Close enough. Close enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, close enough. Cool. Well, thank you for sharing that it's definitely scary. Also, Moimar Gaddafi. if we don't know he's he's been killed yeah but like very

very recently 2019 10 years 10? Lesson 7 that's pretty recently it was less than 2019 2019 2019 was 5 years ago right

that is true he was killed in 2011 oh yeah okay Well, further away, but still. Yeah, he was also an absolutely crazy person. Anyways, that's all I got. Anything you have for, Sarah? Thank you, thank you.

No, nothing else. Again, we're going to be on break for a few weeks, and we will see you all next year. Friendly reminder, again, do you know, philpot at gmail.com or on any of the socials at Doom to Fall Pod, we would love to get negative criticism and feedback so we can work on improving things.

Positive feedback's great too because it helps us stay positive. First is worried about, he wants to hear the negative feedback because we want to grow. So how can we grow? Yeah. Like, are the stories resonating?

Are they not? What would resonate is my voice doing it for you or not? Like, whatever it is. Just any feedback will take it. Yeah. I'm going to try. to talk about all of our episodes on TikTok.

So I went back to episode one and, like, kind of brought it up. And I'm going to keep pushing those to social media. And hopefully that will get us a couple more listeners as well. There was a post office worker who commented on my post on about, I think episode one on TikTok. And they were like, I need something new for my route. Let me download all of these now. So thank you. Yeah, thank you.

That's awesome. And, yeah, if you are looking for something to listen to, keep us in mind. Play your friends. We got lots of stuff. Sweet. This is episode 161, so. We're getting up there. Yeah, pretty great.

Anything, anything else? No, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. We'll see you all on the other side of it. Thanks, Taylor. Thank you.