Pan Am Flight 103 Investigation. Photo: Netflix Flight 103 took off from London Heathrow Airport on December 21, 1988, bound for New York. Of the 259 passengers and crew on board the 747-100, 190 were Americans. They never made it home.
Less than 40 minutes after takeoff, the plane exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. All passengers and 11 Scottish residents on the ground were killed. What later became known as the "Lockerbie disaster" will be the subject of a new series on Netflix today, July 30, 20206: "The Bombing of Pan Am 103".
Until September 11, 2001, the largest and most severe terrorist attack in history, it was one of the deadliest air terrorist acts in the world and one of the largest and most complex international terrorist acts ever investigated by the FBI.
Unraveling the case required unprecedented international cooperation. The explosion at an altitude of 30,000 feet caused destruction spread over more than two thousand square kilometers, or in police-legal language: the largest crime scene in history.
More than 5,000 teams, including investigators from the FBI and Scottish authorities, scoured the area for clues that would help solve the mystery. They found 319 tons of debris and thousands of pieces of evidence. In the years that followed, investigators around the world interviewed more than 10,000 people in 16 countries to understand the nature of the event.
Among the wreckage, investigators found a tiny fragment that helped determine that the bomb had been placed inside a radio in a suitcase that was checked onto the flight. Another small fragment, found inside a shirt, helped identify the stopwatch used by the bombers. The evidence led to two Libyan intelligence agents.
In 1991, the British and US governments announced that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Man Khalifa Fima were guilty in the case. Their trial was held in 2000 in a specially built Scottish courthouse at a US military base in the Netherlands.
The court acquitted Fima and convicted al-Megrahi in 2001, sentencing him to life in prison. He was released in 2009 due to cancer, but he survived for almost three more years.
The Libyan government officially accepted responsibility for the attack and agreed to pay almost three billion dollars to the families of the victims.
Since the attack, the victims' families have continued to advance the investigation, believing that the plot and its execution were not limited to Fima and al-Megrahi.
Federal agents in Washington have repeatedly traveled to states linked to the attack. In private briefings, FBI officials have assured the families of the victims that the investigation is ongoing.
On December 21, 2020, no less than 32 years after the terrorist attack, federal officials charged a third man, Abu Ajla Masoud Khair al-Marimi, in the case. Abu Ajla Masoud Khair al-Marimi was arrested in 2022. It seems that even nearly 40 years after the Lockerbie disaster, the whole truth has not been revealed.