Mourners in the USA and UK attended ceremonies on Sunday for the 270 who died after the midair explosion which dropped a Boeing 747 on a Scottish town twenty years ago.
Pan Am Flight 103’s transponder stopped signalling at seven p.m. on Wednesday, 20th December 1988. A minute later, the fuel-bloated wings of the plane fire-balled Sherwood Crescent in the outskirts of Lockerbie. A route of big and small shrapnel cratered and pocked the ground for over seventy-five miles (130kms).
Eleven townspeople died. One hundred and eighty Americans died, making this the worse attack on US citizens since September 11th, 2001.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), was found guilty of murder. Lamin Kahalifah, LAA station manager in Luqa Airport in Malta, was aquitted.
The trial took place eleven years after the bombing and in a neutral place in the Netherlands.
Libya has never admitted responsibility for the bombing. However, a motive is generally traced back to a series of military confrontations with the US Navy that took place in the 1980s in the Gulf of Sidra, the whole of which Libya claimed as its territorial waters.
President Reagan launched Operation El Dorado Canyon on 15 April 1986 from British bases. This was the first time since World War 2 that U.S. military strikes had taken off from the UK.
In 2002, Libya offered $2.7 billion to settle claims by the families of the 270 killed in the Lockerbie bombing, representing $10 million per family if various trade sanctions were lifted. Legal firms involved received $1.4 million per family member represented.
In 2003, Libya’s UN ambassador submitted a letter to the UN Security Council formally accepting “responsibility for the actions of its officials” concerning the Lockerbie bombing. The Libyan government then proceeded to pay compensation to each family of US$8 million. Legal fees of about US$2.5 million were deducted and, as a result, the UN cancelled the sanctions that had been suspended four years earlier, and U.S. trade sanctions were lifted.
A civil action of $4.5 billion against Libya is pending by Pan Am, which went bankrupt partly as a result of the attack.
Despite having advanced prostate cancer, Mr Megrahi, has been refused bail in November this year pending an appeal.
A statement on behalf of Dr Jim Swire and others whose relatives died in the disaster said, “It has never been a goal of our group to seek revenge.
“The refusal of a return to his family for a dying man whose verdict is not even yet secure looks uncomfortably like either an aspect of revenge - or perhaps timidity.”
According to a report by the BBC, Dr Hans Kochler, one of the UN observers at the trial, spoke of a “spectacular miscarriage of justice”.
Pan Am Flight 103’s transponder stopped signalling at seven p.m. on Wednesday, 20th December 1988. A minute later, the fuel-bloated wings of the plane fire-balled Sherwood Crescent in the outskirts of Lockerbie. A route of big and small shrapnel cratered and pocked the ground for over seventy-five miles (130kms).
Eleven townspeople died. One hundred and eighty Americans died, making this the worse attack on US citizens since September 11th, 2001.
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines (LAA), was found guilty of murder. Lamin Kahalifah, LAA station manager in Luqa Airport in Malta, was aquitted.
The trial took place eleven years after the bombing and in a neutral place in the Netherlands.
Libya has never admitted responsibility for the bombing. However, a motive is generally traced back to a series of military confrontations with the US Navy that took place in the 1980s in the Gulf of Sidra, the whole of which Libya claimed as its territorial waters.
President Reagan launched Operation El Dorado Canyon on 15 April 1986 from British bases. This was the first time since World War 2 that U.S. military strikes had taken off from the UK.
In 2002, Libya offered $2.7 billion to settle claims by the families of the 270 killed in the Lockerbie bombing, representing $10 million per family if various trade sanctions were lifted. Legal firms involved received $1.4 million per family member represented.
In 2003, Libya’s UN ambassador submitted a letter to the UN Security Council formally accepting “responsibility for the actions of its officials” concerning the Lockerbie bombing. The Libyan government then proceeded to pay compensation to each family of US$8 million. Legal fees of about US$2.5 million were deducted and, as a result, the UN cancelled the sanctions that had been suspended four years earlier, and U.S. trade sanctions were lifted.
A civil action of $4.5 billion against Libya is pending by Pan Am, which went bankrupt partly as a result of the attack.
Despite having advanced prostate cancer, Mr Megrahi, has been refused bail in November this year pending an appeal.
A statement on behalf of Dr Jim Swire and others whose relatives died in the disaster said, “It has never been a goal of our group to seek revenge.
“The refusal of a return to his family for a dying man whose verdict is not even yet secure looks uncomfortably like either an aspect of revenge - or perhaps timidity.”
According to a report by the BBC, Dr Hans Kochler, one of the UN observers at the trial, spoke of a “spectacular miscarriage of justice”.
