/ 21 December 2008

UK marks 20th anniversary of Lockerbie bombing

Britain commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing on Sunday.

Britain commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing on Sunday, recalling the night a United States-bound jet carrying 259 passengers and crew was blown up over a Scottish town.

Memorial services were scheduled to take place in the small, quiet community of about 4 000 people, where 11 people were also killed on the ground as flaming debris from the plane crushed houses.

Relatives of the dead are expected to attend a service at London’s Heathrow Airport, where Pan Am Flight 103 took off on the night of December 21 1988, carrying mostly Americans home for Christmas.

Barely 40 minutes into the flight to New York, the Boeing 747 was ripped apart by a bomb in the luggage hold at an altitude of 9 400m, killing everyone on board.

Lockerbie residents recall the explosion turning the sky orange and wreckage, fuel and bodies raining down.

The town had unwittingly been caught up in international terror.

The tortuous investigation into the bombing eventually led to the jailing for 27 years of a former Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi.

He is serving his sentence in a prison in Scotland — now suffering from cancer, he recently failed in an attempt to be released.

The bombing killed 180 Americans, an unprecedented toll in an age before the attacks of September 11 2001, and plunged ties between Libya and the West into a chill that has only recently thawed.

Libya has now been welcomed back into the international fold, but some Lockerbie residents continue to be haunted by memories of the night the jet crashed from the skies on to a town decked out in Christmas decorations.

“It was the nearest thing to hell I ever want to see,” said retired police inspector George Stobbs (74), who had just returned home when he saw a TV newsflash. — AFP