December 21:

1988 : Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Scotland

On this day in 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to
New York explodes in midair over Lockerbie, Scotland,
killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard,
as well as 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground. A
bomb hidden inside an audio cassette player detonated
in the cargo area when the plane was at an altitude of
31,000 feet. The disaster, which became the subject of
Britain's largest criminal investigation, was believed
to be an attack against the United States. One hundred
eighty nine of the victims were American.

Islamic terrorists were accused of planting the bomb
on the plane while it was at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany.
Authorities suspected the attack was in
retaliation for either the 1986 U.S. air strikes
against Libya, in which leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's
young daughter was killed along with dozens of other
people, or a 1988 incident, in which the U.S.
mistakenly shot down an Iran Air commercial flight
over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people.

Sixteen days before the explosion over Lockerbie, the
U.S. embassy in Helsinki, Finland, received a call
warning that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am flight
out of Frankfurt. There is controversy over how
seriously the U.S. took the threat and whether
travelers should have been alerted, but officials
later said that the connection between the call and
the bomb was coincidental.

In 1991, following a joint investigation by the
British authorities and the F.B.I., Libyan
intelligence agents Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and
Lamen Khalifa Fhimah were indicted for murder;
however, Libya refused to hand over the suspects to
the U.S. Finally, in 1999, in an effort to ease United
Nations sanctions against his country, Qaddafi agreed
to turn over the two men to Scotland for trial in the
Netherlands using Scottish law and prosecutors. In
early 2001, al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to
life in prison and Fhimah was acquitted.

In 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for the
bombing, but didn't express remorse. The U.N. and U.S.
lifted sanctions against Libya and Libya agreed to pay
each victim's family approximately $8 million in
restitution. In 2004, Libya's prime minister said that
the deal was the "price for peace," implying that his
country only took responsibility to get the sanctions
lifted, a statement that infuriated the victims’
families. Pan Am Airlines, which went bankrupt three
years after the bombing, sued Libya and later received
a $30 million settlement.

history.com/tdih.do