Helen Archer | On 06, Feb 2024

December 21st 1988 started as a quiet, normal night in the small town of Lockerbie. Its inhabitants were preparing for Christmas, watching early-evening TV, when their peace was irrevocably shattered – loud bangs, windows smashed out by the force of a fireball of unknown origin. Power was lost, and everything went dark. Previously undramatic lives were turned upside down in a matter of seconds, as debris, aeroplane parts and bodies fell from the sky, homes – and the families in them – vapourised. Of the 243 passengers and 16 crew on Pan Am Flight 103, there were no survivors, and a further 11 residents perished on the ground.

This four-part documentary, directed by John Dower, is both emotionally moving and intellectually absorbing, weaving the human stories of those who died with a valiant attempt to untangle a web of opaque geopolitics and CIA interference. But it starts with the stories of the victims, and of the moments of human kindness extended by those shocked residents who found them, stayed with them, and guarded them, until they could be removed from the scene.

Around halfway through the first episode, the investigation begins and from then on is intertwined with the grief of the victims’ families, and their own quest for the truth. Chief among them is the tenacious Dr Jim Swire, whose 24-year-old daughter Flora was on the flight. His discoveries over the course of the years – first, that there were about 10 warnings that there would be an attack on a Pan Am plane from Frankfurt to the US, information disseminated in embassies around the world but not to civilians – would lead him first to take a dummy bomb on a plane to expose the lack of airport security, and later to a secret meeting with Colonel Gaddafi himself.

It was, chiefly, an attack on America, where the plane was bound, and was initially thought to be retaliation by Iran, coming as it did mere months after the US had shot down an Iranian passenger plane over the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board, including 66 children, in what President Reagan described as an “understandable accident”. The FBI spent many years investigating the theory that the Palestinian group PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command) were behind the Lockerbie bombing, acting on Iran’s behalf. Only later would a tiny fragment of evidence, miraculously found in the 845 square mile crime scene, point them towards a Libyan man.

Mysterious men turn up to give information; FBI agents are sent to Malta for months to try to track down the provenance of a tweed suit. The series takes us all the way to the trial – where key witnesses were offered millions to testify – and beyond, as the CIA and the FBI interviewees offer up competing theories, each as difficult to take at face value as the other. As is pointed out towards the end of the miniseries, so long as there is classified information that no one is allowed to access to, it’s hard to see how the truth will ever be revealed. Like so many other events in history, it will doubtless be obfuscated until long after most of us are dead, as government agencies keep their state secrets and protect lucrative deals.

To its credit, when the series does get bogged down in the geopolitics of the assumed perpetrators, it keeps coming back to the human angle – painting detailed pictures of some of those who were lost on the flight, and the lifelong effect it has had on their loved ones. And it is those moments of human kindness that stay with you throughout – Dr Swire being given a lock of his daughter’s hair while her body was still in the hands of investigators; the man who goes out every year to lay a wreath for the woman he found in a hedge, one shoe missing; the couple who stayed with ‘their boy’ for 24 hours – stuck in his airplane chair in the middle of a field – so that he wouldn’t be disturbed by wildlife. Later, we find out about the local women who volunteered to carefully clean the clothes and toys found scattered around the town and its surrounding fields, in order that they could be returned to grieving families. Now, many of these people keep in touch, Americans returning to Lockerbie to remember the place where their loved ones lost their lives, having formed lifelong friendships with those residents who paid tribute to them with their care. Though the truth about the bombing may forever elude them, their connection to Lockerbie endures.

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