December 21

December 21: General Interest
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.

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