Fireball from sky shattered village life

IT’S been nearly 15 long years since the Lockerbie disaster but relatives who lost loved ones are still searching for answers that money can’t buy. What made the disaster all the more chilling was its timing – days before Christmas.

The improbable location, in the quiet borders hills of Scotland, gave it another peculiar horror.

Hundreds of passengers, few of them likely to be aware they were even over Scotland, plummeted onto a town whose residents were equally unaware a New York-bound airliner was passing five miles overhead.

Pan Am Flight 103 came down just after 7pm, about half-an-hour after take-off from Heathrow.

The cockpit fell to earth at Tundergarth, about five miles out of town. The fuel-laden wing section came down on the Sherwood area on the western edge of Lockerbie, adjoining the A74 road, now a motorway.

As it came down it exploded in a fireball, made worse by ruptured gas mains. That was the area where the 11 townspeople died. Here, no trace was ever found of some of the victims some were literally vaporised.

The town hall and the town's ice-rink were pressed into service as temporary mortuaries. Within 24 hours of the disaster, a total of 1,000 police had been drafted in along with 500 military helpers.

The bodies and wreckage had come down in two main flight corridors, one of which included the Kielder forest in Northumbria, the most densely wooded part of Britain.

At the height the plane had been flying, winds were over 100 knots and some of the lighter pieces of wreckage were found miles away.

Public confirmation of what had been suspected from the outset came on December 28 when investigators announced traces of high explosive had been found and the plane had been brought down by a bomb.

A later fatal accident inquiry determined that the bomb was in a radio- cassette player in a Samsonite suitcase which probably joined the flight at Frankfurt. Of the 270 people killed, 188 were Americans and 44 British, including the 11 killed on the ground.