Policemen stand near the wreckage of 747 Pan Am airliner that exploded and crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland, 22 December 1988. AFP
Policemen stand near the wreckage of 747 Pan Am airliner that exploded and crashed over Lockerbie, Scotland, 22 December 1988. AFP

1988 - The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie

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Updated 19 April 2025
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1988 - The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie

1988 - The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie
  • The Lockerbie bombing, the deadliest terrorist attack in UK history, exposed ignored warnings and left lingering questions

JEDDAH: The king leads the Saudi delegation at a Gulf Cooperation Council summit in Manama, there is a new government in Israel, and there is a crisis in Sudan; that Arab News front page could have been published on almost any day in recent years. 

Except the Saudi king was King Fahd, the Israeli prime minister was Yitzhak Shamir, and another report on the page tells you that this was Dec. 23, 1988. 

Two nights before, Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt to Detroit, via London and New York, had been blown up by a terrorist bomb as it crossed the border between England and Scotland. 

With a death toll of 270 — all 243 passengers and 16 crew, and 11 victims on the ground in Lockerbie, where the aircraft smashed into two residential streets at 800 kph — it remains the deadliest terror attack in UK history. 

Few events resonate all the way from a small Scottish border town to the White House. This was one such event. Lockerbie, with its 4,000 souls, joined that list of places in the UK and elsewhere — Aberfan, Munich, Srebrenica, My Lai — forever associated in the public consciousness with cruel and senseless loss of life. 

Scotland, my country, and Glasgow, my city, are not soft places, nor are the journalists they produce noted for emotional incontinence. But I saw tough, cynical, diamond-hard reporters return from Lockerbie numbed into glazed-eyed silence by the enormity of what they saw there, and full of respect and admiration for the quiet dignity and fortitude with which its townspeople bore their losses. 

How we wrote it




The jet crash headlined Arab News’ front page, detailing its devastation in the Scottish town.

Most of the plane’s passengers were American, and their relatives flew from the US to identify bodies and possessions. The people of Lockerbie temporarily buried their own grief to provide accommodation, food, comfort and solace to the bereaved. Bonds were forged that remain to this day. 

When a terrorist attack was confirmed, the perpetrator identified by Washington was inevitable. The US and the regime of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya had been in a state of undeclared war for years, and US airstrikes in April 1986, far from cowing Qaddafi, appeared only to have incensed him. 

US and UK investigators believed Libyan agents in Malta concealed a Semtex bomb inside a radio-cassette player and sent it in a suitcase to Frankfurt, where it was loaded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 and the fate of 270 people was sealed. 

With some narratives, paradoxically, it can make sense to work backwards — in this case from when Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer and former head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, died at his home in Tripoli on May 20, 2012, at the age of 60. 

More than 11 years earlier, in January 2001, three Scottish judges sitting at a special court in a former US air base in the Netherlands had sentenced Al-Megrahi to life imprisonment on 270 counts of murder for the Lockerbie bombing. He served more than eight years in two prisons in Scotland before the Scottish government released him on compassionate grounds when doctors said he had terminal cancer, and he returned to Libya in August 2009. Given three months to live, he lasted for nearly three years. 

Al-Megrahi was, and remains, the only person to be convicted of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103; with his death, therefore, case closed? Well, no. 

The repercussions began soon after the disaster, and continue to this day. Pan Am, its security operations exposed as criminally useless, was bankrupt after a year and out of business after two. UN sanctions against Qaddafi and Libya reinforced their pariah status, and by February 2011 the country was embroiled in civil war. Qaddafi was captured and killed on Oct. 20, 2011. Al-Megrahi would outlive him by seven months. 

Key Dates

  • 1

    The US Federal Aviation Authority issues a bulletin warning of an anonymous tip that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt will be blown up in the next two weeks.

  • 2

    Pan Am Flight 103 is destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie.

    Timeline Image Dec. 21, 1988

  • 3

    Alleged Libyan intelligence officers Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah are indicted for murder by US and Scottish authorities, but Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi refuses to allow their extradition for trial.

    Timeline Image Nov. 1991

  • 4

    After a nine-year standoff, Qaddafi agrees to allow Al-Megrahi and Fhimah to be tried under Scottish law in the Netherlands.

    Timeline Image May 3, 2000

  • 5

    Al-Megrahi is jailed for life. Fhimah is found not guilty.

  • 6

    Al-Megrahi loses an appeal against his conviction.

  • 7

    Qaddafi accepts Libya’s responsibility for the bombing and agrees to pay compensation to each of the victims’ families.

    Timeline Image April 29, 2003

  • 8

    Al-Megrahi, with terminal prostate cancer diagnosed, is released on compassionate grounds and returns to Libya.

    Timeline Image Aug. 20, 2009

  • 9

    Libyan civil war breaks out.

  • 10

    Libya’s former Justice Minister Mustafa Abdul Jalil claims Qaddafi’s regime was implicated in the bombing.

    Timeline Image Feb. 23, 2011

  • 11

    Qaddafi is killed by rebel militia while trying to flee after the fall of Tripoli.

  • 12

    Al-Megrahi dies, aged 60.

  • 13

    The US announces the arrest of Abu Agila Masud, accused of constructing the bomb device that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103.

    Timeline Image Dec. 12, 2022

For the rest of us, airline and airport security have intensified on an apparently endless upward trajectory, and we can at least be grateful that an unaccompanied suitcase with a bomb inside can never again travel from Malta through two airports to the skies over Scotland. 

Perhaps most significantly, however, Lockerbie may have marked the beginning of a collapse in public trust in what our governments tell us. Authorities in the US and the UK have always insisted that Al-Megrahi was guilty, and that he acted alone or with a single accomplice. Few believe that. 

Major world events — the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the moon landings, the 9/11 attacks on America — attract conspiracy theorists like iron to a magnet, and Lockerbie is no exception. It was Iran; it was the Palestinians; it was Mossad; it was the Stasi; it was apartheid South Africa. 

What makes Lockerbie different is that one of the “theories” is almost certainly fact — but which one is anyone’s guess. One man more entitled than most to make that guess is Jim Swire, the softly spoken but determined English country doctor whose daughter Flora, 23, perished on board the plane. 

Swire, now in his late eighties, has devoted his life to finding the truth about Lockerbie. He met and questioned Al-Megrahi. He met and questioned Qaddafi. He has been a thorn in the side of UK and US authorities for more than 30 years, and he believes to this day that the case against Al-Megrahi was a travesty and a tissue of lies, to cover up some ghastly truth that may never be known. 

US President George H. W. Bush set up an aviation security commission in September 1989 to report on the plane’s sabotage, and British relatives of the victims met members of the commission at the US Embassy in London in February the following year. A member of Bush’s staff told one of the relatives: “Your government and ours know exactly what happened, but they are never going to tell.” 




Local resident Robert Love stands by one of the four engines of the ill-fated Pan Am 747 Jumbo jet that exploded and crashed on route to New-York. AFP

Perhaps not. But like a tenacious shoot from a seed buried deep beneath the soil, the truth has a way of reaching the light. 

This year the production of two television drama series, one focused on Swire’s dogged search for that truth, has brought the Lockerbie tragedy back into the public consciousness. Old theories are being revived. 

But this year could also see those theories refuted — or vindicated. 

On May 12, a man identified in court papers as Abu Agila Mohammad Masud Kheir Al-Marimi, or simply Masud, will go on trial in Washington charged with having made the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103. 

The story of how Masud was identified, captured and extradited to the US — a country with which Libya has no extradition treaty — remains to be told. 

It also remains to be seen whether the trial of Masud will bring some kind of closure, or simply further distress, for the still-grieving families of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103, and for the people of Lockerbie.

  • Ross Anderson, associate editor at Arab News, was on duty as a senior editor at Today newspaper in London on the night of the Lockerbie disaster.


Moody’s strips US government of top credit rating, citing Washington’s failure to rein in debt

Moody’s strips US government of top credit rating, citing Washington’s failure to rein in debt
Updated 6 min 31 sec ago
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Moody’s strips US government of top credit rating, citing Washington’s failure to rein in debt

Moody’s strips US government of top credit rating, citing Washington’s failure to rein in debt
  • Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit
  • Standard & Poor’s downgraded federal debt in 2011 and Fitch Ratings followed in 2023

WASHINGTON: Moody’s Ratings stripped the US government of its top credit rating Friday, citing successive governments’ failure to stop a rising tide of debt.
Moody’s lowered the rating from a gold-standard Aaa to Aa1 but said the United States “retains exceptional credit strengths such as the size, resilience and dynamism of its economy and the role of the US dollar as global reserve currency.”
Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit. Standard & Poor’s downgraded federal debt in 2011 and Fitch Ratings followed in 2023.
In a statement, Moody’s said: “We expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9 percent of (the US economy) by 2035, up from 6.4 percent in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending, and relatively low revenue generation.”
Extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, a priority of the Republican-controlled Congress, Moody’s said, would add $4 trillion over the next decade to the federal primary deficit (which does not include interest payments).
A gridlocked political system has been unable to tackle America’s huge deficits. Republicans reject tax increases, and Democrats are reluctant to cut spending.
On Friday, House Republicans failed to push a big package of tax breaks and spending cuts through the Budget Committee. A small group of hard-right Republican lawmakers, insisting on steeper cuts to Medicaid and President Joe Biden’s green energy tax breaks, joined all Democrats in opposing it.


Libyan protesters demand prime minister quit as three ministers resign

Libyan protesters demand prime minister quit as three ministers resign
Updated 28 min 55 sec ago
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Libyan protesters demand prime minister quit as three ministers resign

Libyan protesters demand prime minister quit as three ministers resign
  • Some protesters tried to storm Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah's office, leaving one security force dead
  • At least three ministers resigned in sympathy with the protesters, who want Dbeibah to resign

TRIPOLI: Hundreds of Libyan protesters called on Friday for the ouster of the internationally-recognized prime minister and his government said one security force member was killed when some protesters tried to storm his office.
At least three ministers resigned in sympathy with the protesters, who want Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah to quit. The demonstrators gathered in Martyrs’ Square in Tripoli, chanting slogans such as “The nation wants to topple the government” and “We want elections.”
They then marched to the main government building in the city center. “We won’t leave until he leaves,” one protester said.
The marchers carried pictures of Dbeibah, national security adviser Ibrahim Dbeibah and Interior Minister Emad Tarbulsi with their faces crossed out in red.
Dbeibah, who leads the divided country’s Government of National Unity, came to power through a UN-backed process in 2021. Planned elections failed to proceed that year because of disagreements among rival factions, and he has remained in power.
The government media platform said in a statement that one security member of its building protection force was killed, posting a video footage showing the building’s fence destroyed with rocks on the ground.
“Security forces thwarted an attempted storming of the Prime Minister’s Office by a group embedded among the demonstrators,” it said in the statement.
On Friday, businessman Wael Abdulhafed said: “We are (here) today to express our anger against Dbeibah and all those in the power for years now and (who) prevent elections. They must leave power.”
Calls for Dbeibah to resign increased after two rival armed groups clashed in the capital this week in the heaviest fighting in years. Eight civilians were killed, according to the United Nations.
Violence flared after the prime minister on Tuesday ordered the armed groups to be dismantled. Demonstrators have accused Dbeibah of failing to restore stability and of being complicit in the growing power of armed groups.
Economy and Trade Minister Mohamed Al-Hawij, Local Government Minister Badr Eddin Al-Tumi and Minister of Housing Abu Bakr Al-Ghawi resigned on Friday.
Militia leader Abdulghani Kikli, widely known as Ghaniwa, died in the clashes, which calmed on Wednesday after the government announced a ceasefire.
Libya has had little stability since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising ousted longtime autocrat Muammar Qaddafi. The country split in 2014 between rival eastern and western factions, though an outbreak of major warfare paused with a truce in 2020.
While eastern Libya has been dominated for a decade by commander Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army, control in Tripoli and western Libya has been splintered among numerous armed factions.
The main oil facilities in the major energy exporter are located in southern and eastern Libya, far from fighting in Tripoli. Engineers at several oil fields and export terminals told Reuters output remained unaffected by the clashes.


What We Are Reading Today: American Mirror by Roberto Saba

What We Are Reading Today: American Mirror by Roberto Saba
Updated 39 min 34 sec ago
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What We Are Reading Today: American Mirror by Roberto Saba

What We Are Reading Today: American Mirror by Roberto Saba

US Supreme Court rejects Trump’s bid to resume quick deportations under 18th-century law

US Supreme Court rejects Trump’s bid to resume quick deportations under 18th-century law
Updated 40 min ago
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US Supreme Court rejects Trump’s bid to resume quick deportations under 18th-century law

US Supreme Court rejects Trump’s bid to resume quick deportations under 18th-century law
  • High court action latest in string of judicial setbacks for Trump administration’s effort to speed deportations of people from the US illegally
  • “The Supreme court won’t allow us to get criminals out of our country!” Trump reacts on his Truth Social platform

WASHINGTON: The Supreme Court on Friday barred the Trump administration from quickly resuming deportations of Venezuelans under an 18th-century wartime law enacted when the nation was just a few years old.
Over two dissenting votes, the justices acted on an emergency appeal from lawyers for Venezuelan men who have been accused of being gang members, a designation that the administration says makes them eligible for rapid removal from the United States under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
The court indefinitely extended the prohibition on deportations from a north Texas detention facility under the alien enemies law. The case will now go back to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which declined to intervene in April.
President Donald Trump quickly voiced his displeasure. “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” he posted on his Truth Social platform.
The high court action is the latest in a string of judicial setbacks for the Trump administration’s effort to speed deportations of people in the country illegally. The president and his supporters have complained about having to provide due process for people they contend didn’t follow US immigration laws.
The court had already called a temporary halt to the deportations, in a middle-of-the-night order issued last month. Officials seemed “poised to carry out removals imminently,” the court noted Friday.
Several cases related to the old deportation law are in courts
The case is among several making their way through the courts over Trump’s proclamation in March calling the Tren de Aragua gang a foreign terrorist organization and invoking the 1798 law to deport people.
The high court case centers on the opportunity people must have to contest their removal from the United States — without determining whether Trump’s invocation of the law was appropriate.
“We recognize the significance of the Government’s national security interests as well as the necessity that such interests be pursued in a manner consistent with the Constitution,” the justices said in an unsigned opinion.
At least three federal judges have said Trump was improperly using the AEA to speed deportations of people the administration says are Venezuelan gang members. On Tuesday, a judge in Pennsylvania signed off on the use of the law.
The legal process for this issue is a patchwork one
The court-by-court approach to deportations under the AEA flows from another Supreme Court order that took a case away from a judge in Washington, D.C., and ruled detainees seeking to challenge their deportations must do so where they are held.
In April, the justices said that people must be given “reasonable time” to file a challenge. On Friday, the court said 24 hours is not enough time but has not otherwise spelled out how long it meant. The administration has said 12 hours would be sufficient. US District Judge Stephanie Haines ordered immigration officials to give people 21 days in her opinion, in which she otherwise said deportations could legally take place under the AEA.
The Supreme Court on Friday also made clear that it was not blocking other ways the government may deport people.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, with Alito complaining that his colleagues had departed from their usual practices and seemingly decided issues without an appeals court weighing in. “But if it has done so, today’s order is doubly extraordinary,” Alito wrote.
In a separate opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he agreed with the majority but would have preferred the nation’s highest court to jump in now definitively, rather than return the case to an appeals court. “The circumstances,” Kavanaugh wrote, “call for a prompt and final resolution.”


World’s biggest poultry exporter Brazil confirms bird flu outbreak

World’s biggest  poultry exporter Brazil confirms bird flu outbreak
Updated 17 May 2025
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World’s biggest poultry exporter Brazil confirms bird flu outbreak

World’s biggest  poultry exporter Brazil confirms bird flu outbreak
  • Brazil exports make up 35 percent of global chicken trade

SAO PAULO: Brazil, the world’s largest poultry exporter, confirmed its first outbreak of bird flu on a commercial farm on Friday, triggering a ban on shipments to China and raising the prospect of restrictions from other trade partners.

Brazil exported $10 billion of chicken meat in 2024, accounting for about 35 percent of global trade. Much of that came from meat processors BRF and JBS, which ship to some 150 countries.
China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE, are among the main destinations for Brazil’s chicken exports.
Brazil’s Agriculture Minister Carlos Favaro said on Friday China had banned poulty imports from the country for 60 days, but that Brazilian chicken in transit to other countries would not face problems.
Chinese customs did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside business hours.
The outbreak occurred in the city of Montenegro in Brazil’s southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul, the Agriculture Ministry said. The state accounts for 15 percent of Brazilian poultry production and exports, national pork and poultry group ABPA said in July 2024.
BRF had five processing plants operating in the state as of May 2024. JBS has also invested in chicken processing plants in Rio Grande do Sul under its Seara brand.
The veterinary officials have begun isolating the area of the outbreak in Montenegro and culling the remaining birds, in line with protocol, the state agricultural secretariat said.
“A complementary investigation will be carried out within an initial radius of 10 km (6 miles) from the area where the outbreak occurred, and into possible links with other properties,” the secretariat said.
The ministry also said it was acting to contain and eradicate the outbreak, officially notifying the World Organization for Animal Health, Brazil’s trade partners and other interested parties.
“All necessary measures to control the situation were quickly adopted, and the situation is under control and being monitored by government agencies,” industry group ABPA said in a statement.
Asked for a company response, JBS deferred to ABPA.
Miguel Gularte, CEO of BRF, told a call with analysts he was confident Brazilian health protocols were robust and “this episode” would be quickly overcome.
Since 2022, bird flu has swept through the US poultry industry, killing around 170 million chickens, turkeys and other birds, severely affecting production of meat and eggs.
Bird flu has also infected nearly 70 people in the US, with one death, since 2024. Most of those infections have been among farmworkers exposed to infected poultry or cows.
The further spread of the disease raises the risk that bird flu could become more transmissible to humans.
Brazil, which exported more than 5 million metric tons of chicken products last year, first confirmed outbreaks of the highly pathogenic avian flu among wild birds in May 2023 in at least seven states.
The disease is not transmitted through the consumption of poultry meat or eggs, the Agriculture Ministry said in a statement.
“The Brazilian and world population can rest assured about the safety of inspected products, and there are no restrictions on their consumption,” the ministry said.