Lockerbie Residents Testify at Trial

Residents of the Scottish town of Lockerbie recounted Thursday the terror of flaming aircraft debris and 259 bodies raining from the sky as the trial of two Libyans accused of bombing Pan Am Flight 103 entered its second day.

Eleven Lockerbie residents also were killed when the plane plunged into a neighborhood the evening of Dec. 21, 1988. Prosecutors accuse the two suspected Libyan intelligence agents, Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, of being behind the terrorist attack that claimed 270 lives.

“There was fire just raining down,” said Jasmine Anne Bell, 53, a social worker who was at her brother’s house that night and stepped outside to see what had happened. She had to duck as gray metallic pieces whizzed overhead.

“The fire was falling down from the sky. As it landed on the ground, I was stepping backwards to avoid the fire, really. I stepped back and back and back until my back was against the wall, I couldn’t go any further,” she told the Scottish court here.

Bell said her brother pulled her to safety. When the fire subsided, he went out to cover the dead with white sheets. She was unhurt.

“There was an almighty explosion,” said police officer Geoffrey Carpenter, who was off duty when the explosion blew open his front door. “There was an inrush of air from the outside. I ran out into the front garden, and . . . there was a glow in the sky and debris up to between 400 to 600 feet in the air.”

Carpenter, who helped coordinate initial relief efforts, described the crater that swallowed three homes, the cockpit that landed near a church with bodies inside and “what turned out to be the fuselage in the back gardens between two rows of houses.”

He was the last witness in the day’s hearings, which ended early because the testimony of the 11 witnesses was briefer than expected.

In the first cross-examination of witnesses, Megrahi’s lawyer, William Taylor, suggested that evidence could have been tampered with: He asked Carpenter to confirm that it would have been “impossible to secure a crime scene of that size.” He also asked Carpenter when the first reporters and FBI investigators arrived on the scene and what “modern and sophisticated equipment” they brought.

Carpenter said he saw reporters within 1 1/2 hours. FBI investigators came two or three days later with digital cameras and satellite communications equipment, which he pointed out was state-of-the-art technology at the time.

On the first day of hearings Wednesday, the Libyans repeated their pleas of not guilty. Defense lawyers said they plan to prove that two Palestinian terrorist organizations were responsible.