Posted on 05/18/2025 1:17:29 PM PDT by RandFan
When Pan Am Flight 103 set off from Heathrow to New York, its passengers and crew were looking forward to returning home to celebrate Christmas - but tragically, they never made it
The Lockerbie bombing where 270 people sadly lost their lives is still the deadliest terror attack in the history of the UK, even though it took place more than 30 yeas ago.
It was 21 December, 1988, when the Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York exploded just 38 minutes into its flight while travelling over Lockerbie, with the wreckage of the plain raining down on the houses below.
And it wasn't just the passengers who lost their lives - the small Scottish town lost 11 residents, including a family of four, Jack and Rosalind Somerville and their children, Paul, 12, and Lindsay, 10, who died when a section of the aircraft fell on their home in Sherwood Crescent.
In Lockerbie, residents opened their front doors to see 259 bodies dropping out of the sky, landing on the street in front of them. After the bomb exploded, everything went dark and eerily quiet in the town.
The 243 passengers boarding their pre-Christmas flight at London Heathrow or via Frankfurt in Germany came from 21 countries and ranged in age from two months old to 82.
Forty per cent of the 270 total victims were aged 25 or younger, many of them children, while two-thirds were American
(Excerpt) Read more at mirror.co.uk ...
In the debris, investigators found a tiny fragment that helped establish that the bomb had been placed inside a radio in a piece of luggage aboard Pan Am 103. Another small fragment, found embedded in a piece of shirt, helped identify the explosive timer. This evidence led to two Libyan intelligence operatives.
In 1991, the British and American governments charged Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah in the case. Their trial in 2000 was held in Scottish court built for the occasion on a former U.S. military base in the Netherlands. The court acquitted Fhimah and convicted al Megrahi in 2001, sentencing him to life in prison. He was released in 2009 when he was believed near death from cancer, but he survived almost three more years.
They have another former intel officer in custody pending trial
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In December 2020, the US Attorney General announced new charges against Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, a former Libyan intelligence operative, for his role in the bombing, with a trial set to take place in Washington in May.
Not only remember it, I was flying back to the US from Germany, stopped to visit friends in London, or I would have been on that flight.
I had been a travel writer for Pan Am. They flew me all over the world to write articles for their inflight magazine. Remember those? Pan Am, unfortunately, stopped flying to Asia, choosing European flights instead. They went out of business after Lockerbie.
We should have made Operation El Dorado look like a Tupperware party.
Brought to you by the DEA.
Dear Lord!! So glad you were spared!!!!
Went to see the site, back in ‘92.
A horrible event.
I remember seeing the news, and they were interviewing a mother of one of the passengers, right when she heard the news her daughter was on board.
I will never forget it.
Thanks to Starlink streaming, we’ll be able to see the final moments of the passengers before a plane crashes, not that its something people want to see about their relatives.
I bet Islam does.
Earlier this year, a British mini series titled “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” starring Colin Firth aired on the Peacock channel. A new BBC drama series titled “The Bombing of Pan Am 103” begins tonight on British TV.
Libyans were Contractors working Iran, imho
The US airliner was downed 6 months after an Iranian Airbus full of holiday travelers was downed by the USS Vincennes
PanAm 103 was blood revenge
And Libya owed Iran…favors
In April 1988, the U.S. Navy effectively destroyed the Iranian navy following a mine attack on the destroyer USS Roberts. The Navy sank an Iranian frigate, four armed speedboats, blew up two armed oil platforms, and damaged another frigate in one of the shortest and most successful campaigns of the postwar period.
Yet even today, there is no actual name attached to the engagement. It’s known simply as “Operation Praying Mantis,” not the obvious “Battle of the Persian Gulf.” ..
I remember that the Dutch (looks like Scottish authorities may have been behind the release) let the ringleader go home after a few years in custody. He then lived a life of luxury for almost 3 years before passing away from natural causes. He should have been hung, drawn, and quartered.
I lost a friend on that flight
He had prostate cancer. Released on humanitarian grounds as the powers that be spat on the dead and living of the Lockerbie flight, by the forerunners of the current self-destruct faction of the leftist migrant-welcoming government of ballless Scotland today.
Yes he was celebrated as a hero in his hometown upon release . F*cking sick if you ask me
The US should have dropped a couple of cruise missiles on his villa.
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