Almost four decades after Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, killing 270 people, one father is still convinced the wrong man was convicted – and that the real perpetrators have escaped justice.
Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora died in the bombing, has long argued that Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only man convicted, was innocent. Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer, was found guilty in 2001 and died in 2012. But Swire befriended him, insisting that whoever killed Flora “got away with mass murder”.
“Jim Swire, whose daughter died in Lockerbie bombing, says Iran was behind attack, not Libya as official story claims.”
“The burning issue was to get to the truth,” Swire said. “Always has been, always will be and I will not shut up about what I know to be true.”
For Swire, the simplest explanation is that Iran, not Libya, was behind the attack. The bombing came five months after 290 people were killed when a US battleship shot down an Iranian commercial airliner. Iran swore revenge, and months later Pan Am 103 exploded on its way to New York.
Swire points to a militant cell in Frankfurt, part of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), that was foiled by German police before the Lockerbie bombing. Police seized explosive devices concealed in radio cassette players, designed to trigger at altitude. The bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 was hidden in a radio cassette player inside a Samsonite briefcase. Because of this, Swire believes the device was loaded at Frankfurt, not Malta as the court concluded.
Most of the Lockerbie victims’ families do not agree that Megrahi’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice, and the bomber’s own appeals either failed or were abandoned. But later this year, a man suspected of making the bomb, Abu Agila Masud, goes on trial in Washington DC. Whether that trial will resolve the questions Swire has raised remains to be seen.