Lockerbie as it happened - panic, icy darkness and victims who landed alive
One winter evening just before Christmas 1988, an unbearable sound caused frightened residents of Lockerbie to rush and open their front doors. In scenes reminiscent of a horror movie, bodies dropped out of the sky and landed on the street in front of them as an eerie silence and petrol like smell filled the air. It's a disturbing memory some of them still can’t get out of their heads 35 years after the atrocity.
Some 259 bodies fell from the sky that night - many appeared to be sleeping while others were barely recognisable as human remains. It's a memory that still haunts Bunty Galloway who told The Guardian she was watching TV just like any other night when she heard the strangest noise. She opened her front door to see two young women fall directly onto the street in front of her house and the body of a child lying at the foot of her steps.
Lorraine Kelly in 1988 reporting from Lockerbie for TVAM (ITV)At the time Donald Bogie lived in Ashgrove Terrace and said he also heard the strange sound before everything went dark and eerily quiet. He ran out of his house to see the small Scottish border town in flames. A policeman who lived in the neighbourhood said that it seemed as if a 'small atom bomb' had hit the area. It wasn't until hours later that residents learned a passenger jet had crashed into their town. Then, over the following few days news emerged a bomb had caused the crash, but how did the attack unfold and could it have been avoided?
13 December 1988 Moscow, US Embassy
A threat was made a week before the plane crash claimed 270 lives that day, 259 of them plane passengers and 11 Lockerbie residents. A diplomat signed an 'administrative notice' for the benefit of all embassy personnel, The Guardian reported. It said: "The embassy has been notified by the national flight authorities that an unidentified individual called a US diplomatic service in Europe on 5 December 1988 and claimed that a bomb would be planted on a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the US sometime in the next two weeks...
"Since this information could not be confirmed, the embassy leaves it up to all travellers to decide if they should change their travel plans or switch to another US airline." The Federal Aviation Administration informed the US Department of State as well as the affected airline and airports, but no one else was warned.
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Bryony was just 20 month old and was travelling to the United States with her mother Yvonne Owen from Wales, to spend Christmas in Boston.London, Heathrow Airport, Terminal 3, 21 December 1988, 5pm
Passengers from 21 different countries checked in and boarded the flight from Heathrow airport that day. They were booked to go on a Pan American Airways Boeing 747 to John F Kennedy Airport in New York. Among them were 35 US students who had spent six to 12 months in Europe on an exchange programme and 12 children under the age of 10. The youngest passenger was nine weeks old and the oldest was a 79-year-old woman from Budapest.
7.02pm and 50 seconds
As events unfolded following the disaster, clues were found which have enabled professionals to reconstruct what happened that day. First, an explosion shook the aircraft before the electricity went out and everyone was plunged into darkness. Less than a second later, large sections of the forward fuselage were ripped away and the nose of the plane broke off and fell towards the ground.
Lorraine Kelly returns to Lockerbie to see how residents coped with the aftermath of Europe’s deadliest terror attack.The passengers would have immediately lost consciousness as conditions quickly became similar to those on the peak of Mount Everest. People in the first few rows of seats were catapulted out of the disintegrating plane, while several others were sucked into the engines that were still operating at full throttle. It's thought that up to 60 percent of people on board the aeroplane were still alive when they hit the ground.
Lockerbie, 7.03pm and 26 seconds
The plane crashed to the ground at half the speed of sound striking Sherwood Crescent, completely obliterating some of the houses and killing 11 people. The ball of fire caused by the crash reached a local petrol station where its diesel tanks exploded and its supply of tyres started to burn. The earthquake monitoring centre in Eskdalemuir, 14km away, registered a tremor of 1.6 on the Richter scale.
The community rallied together - moving corpses to the town hall and then the hockey stadium because it was the only place large and cool enough to store so many bodies. The county's police force, the smallest in Scotland, was quickly reinforced. Normally only four policemen worked in the Lockerbie region, but by Thursday morning there were 1,100 working alongside 1,000 other soldiers, firemen and volunteers.
Months following the Lockerbie disaster...
The investigators discovered pieces of wreckage from the luggage containers which showed signs of an explosion. Searches concluded an 'improvised explosive device' had been built into the recorder and had been placed in a brown Samsonite suitcase. This was contained in the report that was submitted in July 1990, more than 18 months after the crash.
In 2001, former Libyian security officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the offence the only person found guilty of the bombing. He was jailed for 27 years but died of prostate cancer aged 60 in 2012 after being released on compassionate grounds in 2009.
Return To Lockerbie is on ITV tonight, November 15, at 9pm
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