Lockerbie bombing case re-examined as new trial looms

The author, Myles Bonnar, revisits the Lockerbie bombing, the UK's deadliest terror attack, which occurred when he was just one year old. Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in December 1988, killing 259 people on board and 11 on the ground. The subsequent conviction of Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi in 2001 led Bonnar to believe the case was largely settled.

However, the story is far from over. Later this year, Abu Agila Masud, a man suspected of constructing the bomb, faces trial in Washington D.C. This impending trial has prompted Bonnar to delve deeper into the case with fresh eyes for a Radio 4 Intrigue podcast series, discovering a complexity that challenges easy answers.

Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was among the victims, remains convinced that the true perpetrators escaped justice. He believes Megrahi is innocent and has publicly questioned the official account, suggesting Iran, rather than Libya, was behind the attack. Swire points to the downing of an Iranian commercial airliner five months prior, which killed 290 people, as a potential motive for Iranian retaliation.

Further complicating the narrative, Swire suggests the bomb, concealed in a Samsonite briefcase and a Toshiba cassette recorder, may have been loaded in Frankfurt, not Malta as concluded by the court. German police had previously foiled a militant cell in Frankfurt, linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), seizing similar explosive devices. This detail, Swire argues, supports his theory that the device was assembled and loaded in Frankfurt, implicating a different chain of events than the one presented in the official trial.

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The burning issue was to get to the truth. Always has been, always will be and I will not shut up about what I know to be true.