CrimePsych

In 1988 many horrific events occurred but our focus in this article will be on just one of these – a Pan American airlines flight en route from London to New York suddenly broke up in the air at just after 7pm on December 21st while at an altitude of 31,000 feet above Western Scotland. While the vast majority of you may not remember the actual event, one tends to believe that the second the name ‘Lockerbie’ is thrown into the mix the severity and heinous nature of the event may jog a few memories.

The Boeing 747 aircraft disappeared from radar screens before slamming into the ground with the force of a small earthquake on top of the small town of Lockerbie. As a result the 259 people on board as well as 11 people in the town were killed.

At the time, investigators had no clue as to why the aircraft had broken up mid air but thoughts quickly fell towards foul play due to the way the wreckage had spread across a large proportion of the Scottish countryside in two distinct trails – any seasoned investigator would know that this generally meant a sudden separation of the two halves, creating the two distinct trajectories.

However with every general rule one still needs to prove the assumption scientifically and in the case of this particular tragedy that means collecting every piece of evidence available, an enormous task at the best of times but when you consider the wreckage was spread over almost 2,600km in 4 million individual fragments the phrase ‘needle in a hay stack’ doesn’t really cut it when searching for the cause.

That being said the experts involved in this particular investigation did an absolutely breathtaking job reconstructing the entire plane from its debris. Each individual piece was taken to a military depot near Carlisle, Scotland where they tried to seamlessly connect each piece with the next.

Upon analysis of the debris that fell in certain areas it was found that the pieces of the aft luggage hold had fallen in a particularly small area whereas the fragments of the forward hold were spread much more widely. What this suggested to forensic investigators was that the aft luggage area had been one of the first parts of the aircraft to break up and unsurprisingly let them to begin suspecting a bomb had been placed in luggage.

This suspicion was confirmed when two of the cargo containers that were on the aircraft were found to have blast damage from a high velocity explosive. Upon closer inspection a tiny fragment of printed circuit board (PCB) was found embedded in a crease having been forced into it by the energy of the blast. This was then traced to a particular model of Toshiba radio/cassette player and it was established that this not only contained the explosive but also other fragments revealed that the cassette player had been concealed inside a brown suitcase which had been loaded in on the outside of a container so as to be closest the aircraft’s outer skin.

All of the aircraft’s various fragments were sent to the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnbrough, England and courtesy of computer technology a three dimensional re-construction was able to establish the breakup sequence. The flight recorders also shed light onto the sequence of events as the explosion was clearly heard on the cockpits voice recorder before a total power outage prevented further audio from being captured. Further to this, parts of the cables that held the curtains up that screened the luggage containers were found inside one of the engine air intakes – a sure fire sign that the fuselage had broken up while the engines were still running.

In addition to the forensic methods already mentioned blast analysis experts conducted a series of tests to try and establish the amount of explosives used by the terrorists. Using identical radio/cassette players and identical baggage compartments they were able to ascertain over a series of explosions that only 1kg of explosive had been used in the attack. The damage caused by the initial explosion aboard the aircraft was carefully compared with the resultant damage from their experiments and this also contributed to them being able to establish the amount of explosive used.

Subsequently the position of the luggage within the hold showed that the offending bag, that is, the one that contained the cassette player, had been transferred from a connecting flight arriving from Frankfurt before the doomed Flight 103 was due to take off from London. Clothing fibres that were also found in the luggage were able to be traced to Malta, and had only arrived in Frankfurt the day before. Further enquiries traced the clothing to unknown Libyan’s and it wasn’t until some 12 years later, under threat of economic sanctions, that the Libyan government identified the two terrorists as members of their own intelligence services.

Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah and Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi were put on trial in a specially convened court in Holland and were held under Scottish Law – representing the victim’s country. Then on January 31st, 2001 after a gruelling nine month trial Fhimah was acquitted but thankfully Al Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, to be served in Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison.