Rage Fuels Father’s Obsession Over Air Crash : Terrorism: The parent of a Pan Am Flight 103 victim relentlessly pursues an answer to the question: ‘Why?’

Jim Swire is a country doctor whose days and evenings are devoted to his patients.

His nights belong to his obsession: airport security and the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed his daughter, Flora.

“Why, Oh why, Flora?”

Swire wrote that on his briefcase, around a circular photograph of his firstborn. In frequent meetings with government officials, he makes sure that they see it.

“You can see their hackles rising when they see a person they’ve allowed to be killed. I don’t see why they shouldn’t see it,” said the soft-spoken, gray-haired physician.

Flora Swire, a happy medical student, a gifted artist and musician, was traveling to the United States to spend Christmas with her American boyfriend. She was one of 270 people who died when the plane blew up at 7:04 p.m. on Dec. 21, 1988, and rained wreckage on the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

It was the day before her 24th birthday.

In the 21 months since, her father has had periods of intense depression and rage. But his campaign to point out security flaws, bring the terrorists to justice and reform British airport security has been relentless.

On Monday, Swire will be in Dumfries, 10 miles west of Lockerbie, for the opening of a public Scottish inquiry into the bombing.

“Rage is my secret weapon. When I am sitting at this desk, it’s 2 a.m. and I have another letter to write but I want to go to bed, I just think about that flight, that warm airplane at four minutes past 7, and it makes me so angry that the adrenaline starts going and I can last for a few more hours,” he said.

The desk is Swire’s communications center: a large computer, fax machine and desk telephone to supplement a mobile phone tucked in the breast pocket of his gray suit.

There are many photographs of Flora--smiling with alert, playful eyes--in the Swires’ sandstone house overlooking the Malvern Hills of central England.

A son, William, is taking a year off before college. Catherine, who saw her sister off at Heathrow Airport, still lives at home.

“She was excited about Flora’s trip and even thought about buying a ticket too,” Swire said. He took a deep breath, fighting to keep the voice steady.

“I came within a hair’s breadth of losing both of them.”

The Swires keep a comfortable house, where the Burmese cat has free rein over the Oriental rugs, the dog’s long tail slaps against antiques, and dinner in the kitchen is beef stew and home-grown fruit.

But talk around the table is about Mohammad Abu Talb, the Palestinian terrorist serving a life sentence in Sweden for bombings against American and Israeli targets in Europe. Lockerbie investigators have identified Talb as a suspect.

A telephone call from a Swedish journalist takes Swire from the table.

“A (doctor’s) family is used to being interrupted at the dinner table but this is just unbelievable,” said Jane Swire, her voice trailing off, her eyes cast down.

The inquiry beginning Monday, the Scottish version of an inquest, is not the wide-ranging investigation that Swire has been demanding. But he intends to spend as much of the opening week in Dumfries as his practice allows. He hopes to testify.

“I am a thorn in the flesh of the British government. Thorns fester and I am determined not to leave off until we have some answers,” he said.

Swire wants to know why Department of Transport warnings about a cassette recorder bomb like the one that blew up Flight 103 reached the airport security staff after his daughter was dead.

Why was a warning of a terrorist threat given to U.S. Embassy staffers in Helsinki, Finland, and other cities but not to the public?

Why has the British government refused an independent inquiry, even after a U.S. presidential commission reported in May that the disaster could have been prevented?

There were 259 passengers on the flight, including 31 British citizens. As spokesman for U.K. Families Flight 103, Swire frequently travels to the United States for meetings with the two active family groups there.

In May, he risked arrest by flying to New York with a fake bomb in his suitcase to dramatize his belief that airport security is still too lax.

Swire, 54, learned about explosives during army service in the Royal Engineers. He says it took him six hours to buy the parts and duplicate the terrorist’s bomb, substituting marzipan for Semtex, the Czechoslovakian-made plastic explosive.

“When I smuggled the bomb on the flight to New York, and we flew up over Scotland, and climbed to 31,000 feet, it was a strange sensation that the other passengers didn’t have a clue that there was a fake bomb in the hold.”

Swire’s record for interviews is 24 in one day and his news conferences are as well-run as any politician’s.

A scholarship in Flora’s memory has been established at Nottingham University. But the young woman may be most vividly remembered in the dark circles under her father’s eyes, a sign of his determination.

Swire said he no longer wants vengeance by having people fired, but desires improved airport security to prevent another disaster. He admits the goal is distant.

Swire said his initial rage was stoked by officials who treated him as an ignorant outsider.

“It made me livid,” he said. “I had seen dead bodies lying in pieces in a mausoleum in Lockerbie. The experts didn’t know what the death of 270 people looks like and they never would. That’s why they can forget it and have such a lackadaisical approach to security.”

The Swires traveled to Lockerbie a few days after the disaster.

Families were told they could not see the bodies because it would be too upsetting, a policy that Swire says goes against psychological practices.

“Being a doc, I pulled some strings and the pathologist put my daughter’s body aside for me,” Swire said.

There were flowers around her body in the makeshift mortuary, and the pathologist had clipped a lock of Flora’s thick, black hair to give to her father.

“My mind was blank and I half expected to feel rage,” Swire said. “But I just felt waves of sadness passing over me, wave after wave, a flying carpet of sadness.”