On Eve of Trial, Lockerbie Case Splits Survivors

U.S. and British governments have come and gone since a bomb tore Pan Am Flight 103 into tens of thousands of pieces over Lockerbie, Scotland, more than 11 years ago, killing 270 people and forever changing the lives of their families. The airline has ceased to exist. Suspicions and conspiracy theories have flourished.

Since that day in December 1988, at least half a dozen fathers of Pan Am victims have succumbed to deaths seemingly hastened by grief. Another father, Jim Swire, has dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth and justice in the death of his daughter Flora.

The trial of two Libyans--alleged intelligence agents accused of planting the bomb aboard the aircraft--that opens in the Netherlands on Wednesday is an important first step on the road to both those ends, says Swire, president of U.K. Victims of Pan Am 103.

But it is only a first step.

“At the end of this trial, we are going to know whether or not these two are guilty,” Swire said. “But there is no way the trial is going to answer many of the major questions we still have.”

The most important question is who ordered the bombing.

The 1991 indictments by U.S. and British prosecutors allege that defendants Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah smuggled a bomb-laden Samsonite suitcase aboard a plane from Malta to Frankfurt, Germany, where it was transferred to London’s Heathrow Airport and then to U.S.-bound Pan Am 103. But even if they are found guilty on murder and conspiracy charges, they would have been minor players. No one assumes that they would have acted on their own initiative.

Libya, Iran, Syria All Seen as Culprits

Swire’s counterpart in the United States, George Williams, has no doubt who gave them their orders. Like many of the families of the 189 American victims, Williams is convinced that Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi masterminded the terrorist attack.

“It is obvious these two did it and they were Libyan intelligence agents who obviously got orders from Kadafi,” Williams said in a telephone interview from his home in Maryland. “In a regime like his, you don’t do anything freelance.”

Swire is less certain. He leans toward the theory that Iran, and to a lesser extent Syria, were behind the attack. The U.S. Navy ship Vincennes had shot down an Iran Air flight less than six months earlier, killing the 290 people aboard and supplying the Iranian government with ample motive for revenge.

“Motive is a good thing to look at when you’re trying to solve a murder mystery,” Swire said.

Defense lawyers for the Libyans apparently will argue that Syrian-backed Palestinians carried out the Pan Am attack on behalf of Iran. Williams thinks that Swire has been “hoodwinked” by the Libyans; Swire thinks that many of the American families are approaching the trial with a presumption of guilt.

Such tensions serve to highlight the torment of their decade-long search for justice. Many of the families feel that they have been swimming against a tide of multiple conspiracy theories and the reluctance of their own governments to get to the bottom of the Lockerbie case. Each family has dealt with the death of a loved one in its own way. Some have withdrawn or tried to move on; others have turned anger and grief into activism.

Swire has opted for activism. Standing 6 feet tall, with a shock of white hair, the 64-year-old Scottish-born family doctor has become Britain’s public face of Lockerbie. Lockerbie, in turn, has become a mission verging on obsession for Swire.

His daughter Flora was the eldest of three children and a talented medical student accepted for postgraduate studies at Cambridge University. She found a last-minute ticket on Pan Am 103 and was on her way to visit her boyfriend in the United States for Christmas when the plane exploded a day before her 24th birthday.

Photographs of Flora fill the living room of the Swires’ country home in Finstall, not far from Birmingham. Leaded glass windows look out on the 4,500-tree forest that Swire and his wife, Jane, planted in their daughter’s name: Flora’s Wood. And a larger-than-life portrait of her hanging in their bedroom is among the first things they see each day.

Swire’s quest for justice has been a full-time job, forcing him to give up his medical practice. It has spanned several continents and put him in contact with everyone from the leaders of the African and Arab leagues to Kadafi himself.

While his own Conservative government at the time refused to meet with him for years, Swire flew to the Libyan capital, Tripoli, after the U.S. and British indictments were issued to plead with Kadafi to hand over the suspects for trial. He took gifts to the Libyan leader in the Arab tradition and commiserated with him over the loss of their daughters--a baby girl whom Kadafi said he had adopted was killed during a U.S. air attack on Libya in 1986. But Swire says he was scared at first about going to Libya.

“I left letters with my solicitors in case I didn’t come back,” Swire said. He thought for a moment that he wouldn’t return after he leaned forward to pin a badge with the phrase “Pan Am 103 The Truth Must Be Known” on Kadafi’s green gown. The Libyan leader’s many female bodyguards simultaneously released the safety locks on their automatic weapons.

But Swire did not try to harm Kadafi, and the bodyguards did not harm him. Swire made two more trips to see the Libyan leader, all of which have earned him the ire of many U.S. families.

“I do not understand how he could go to Libya,” said Susan Cohen of New Jersey, whose daughter Theodora died on Pan Am 103.

“You think we’re having a trial because Jim Swire went to Libya and looked Kadafi in the eyes? Please. This trial would never have happened unless Kadafi got what he wanted. This thing is nothing but a deal.”

As part of the internationally brokered deal for handing over the suspects for trial by Scottish judges in a neutral country, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan suspended economic sanctions against Libya that had been imposed in 1992.

Some Say U.S., Britain Made Deal With Kadafi

But in the minds of Cohen and some other U.S. families, the deal goes far beyond that. They believe that the Clinton administration and the Labor government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair were so anxious to put Lockerbie behind them and open the way for trade relations with oil-rich Libya that they assured Kadafi that the case would end with the trial.

U.S. and British officials steadfastly reject such accusations, but Williams, for one, isn’t convinced.

“Clinton just sent a delegation to see if it is safe for the American public to travel in Libya. Three weeks before the trial? I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” Williams said. “Kadafi is the one who ordered my son dead, and Kadafi is the one I’m after.”

Swire says he is equally anxious that the death of his daughter not be “swept under some politician’s rug.” He has met with Blair and found him far more cooperative than the previous, Conservative administrations. He hopes that new information will come out during the trial to force the British government to launch an independent inquiry into the bombing.

Swire has taken an apartment in the Netherlands, where the trial will be held at Camp Zeist, a refurbished military base that has been declared Scottish territory for the duration of the case. He plans to attend most of the proceedings, expected to last for at least a year.

And then?

And then the fight for truth and justice will continue, he says. “We all have ways of coping. Jane and I realized long ago we would carry the burden of this to our graves.”

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Briefing on Lockerbie Case

Background on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed all 259 on board and 11 on the ground in December 1988.

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Key people in Lockerbie trial:

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DEFENDANTS

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Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi, 48:

Security chief for Libyan Arab

Airlines. Formerly director of

Center for Strategic Studies in

Libya. Libya. Allegedly bought clothes

contained in suitcase holding bomb.

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Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, 44: Libyan airline station manager in Malta who allegedly had access to Air Malta luggage tags. Described as member of Libyan intelligence service. Has acknowledged working for airline but says he left job three months before bombing.

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COURT OFFICERS

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Presiding judge: Lord Sutherland, longest-serving member of Scottish High Court. Known to run tight ship, with little room for courtroom grandstanding.

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Other judges: Lord Coulsfield, Lord MacLean.

Chief prosecutor: Colin Boyd, former Scottish solicitor general who took over case after Feb. 15 resignation of Lord Hardie. Previously was No. 2 man in Lockerbie investigation.

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Trail of bomb

According to prosecutors:

* Luqa Airport, Malta, 9:15 a.m.: Suitcase holding bomb planted inside cargo hold of Air Malta flight taking off for Frankfurt, Germany. Stolen tags clear it through to United States via Frankfurt and London.

* Frankfurt International Airport, afternoon: Suitcase transferred to Pan Am Flight 103A, departing for London.

* Heathrow Airport, London, 6:25 p.m.: Flight 103 takes off en route to New York and Detroit. Suitcase in aluminum cargo container in forward hold, 25 inches from fuselage wall.

* 31,000 feet over Lockerbie, Scotland, 7:02:50 p.m.: Timer detonates bomb, which blows hole about size of dinner plate in belly of Boeing 747. Aircraft rips apart, plunges six miles to Earth, killing everyone aboard and 11 people on the ground.