Mourners Fight Back Tears at Service for Pan Am Dead

Hundreds of Americans and other mourners bowed their heads and fought back tears Wednesday at a memorial service for the victims of the bombing of Pan American World Airways Flight 103.

British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher stood among 700 people packed into Dryfesdale Parish Church as the Rev. James Whyte, head of the Church of Scotland, endorsed her call for no retaliation for the attack.

Sheltering under umbrellas against the rain, local people huddled with visitors outside the church to follow the service, relayed by loudspeaker, and remember the Dec. 21 disaster.

“This, we now know, was an act of human wickedness,” Whyte said in his sermon to relatives, government ministers, politicians, rescue workers and Pan Am staff from around the world. “That such carnage of the young and of the innocent should have been willed by men in cold and calculated evil, is horror upon horror,” Whyte said.

But as the international hunt continued to identify the bombers, he urged the congregation to reject the idea of retaliation and further violence.

“There is nothing that way but bitterness and the destruction of our own humanity,” he said.

All 259 passengers and crew aboard the New York-bound Boeing 747 were killed and 11 people died on the ground when wreckage slammed into Lockerbie, setting homes and cars ablaze.

Inside the church, Thatcher and other members of her government stood alongside U.S. Ambassador Charles H. Price II at the simple, 40-minute ecumenical service, which was broadcast live on national television.

200 Relatives of U.S. Victims

About 200 relatives of American crash victims were believed to have been flown to Lockerbie by Pan Am.

Wreaths lay piled outside the church and passers-by paused throughout the morning to look at sad, rain-soaked flowers outside the town hall, turned into a temporary mortuary.

For the first time since the disaster, helicopters collecting crash debris fell silent Wednesday, but police said the search--covering an area of 150 square miles--was continuing outside the town.

Police spokesman Angus Kennedy said 242 bodies had been found, of which 149 had been identified.