'The wounds never heal'
Jim Swire reflects on his search to find those responsible for blowing up PanAm Flight 103 in 1988, killing his daughter and 269 others.
Sky
- Michael Hodges
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It wasn’t the vivid re-creation of the explosion that killed his daughter Flora that upset Jim Swire most when he watched Lockerbie: a Search for Truth. Rather, it was Catherine McCormack, playing his wife Jane, counting down slowly from 15 to zero. That is the far calmer but devastating on-screen moment when she gives voice to the thought that haunts her, that Flora might have been conscious before hitting the ground. “In the scene Catherine says, ‘If you get chucked out of your airplane at 31,000 feet, you will recover consciousness for about 15 seconds,’” says Swire. “Watching it brought Jane and I back with a very sharp jolt to what the series is really about: a brutal mass murder.”
Flora Swire, a medical student at Nottingham University, was 23 when she boarded Pam Am Flight 103 on 21 December 1988. The Boeing 747 was flying out of Heathrow to New York’s JFK Airport. Flora, who was going to spend Christmas in the US with her boyfriend and would have been 24 on 22 December, was taken to the airport by her 21-year-old-sister Cathy. Just after 7pm the plane exploded over the town of Lockerbie in south-west Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew on the plane died and 11 people in Lockerbie lost their lives when the burning wreckage slammed into streets and houses below.
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Some of the most startling scenes in Sky’s five-part drama, based on Jim Swire’s book with Peter Biddulph The Lockerbie Bombing: a Father’s Search for Justice and starring Colin Firth as Jim Swire, come when parts of plane start to fall from the sky, first a smattering of metal pieces, then huge chunks of aircraft. One boy survives because he has gone out for a bike ride. His house is destroyed.
As Lockerbie burned, Swire was at home in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, with Jane and their son William. He remembers that night as “an utter disaster”. Alerted by newsflashes, he spent hours on the phone to New York before a Pan Am employee confirmed Flora was among the dead. “The wounds never heal,” he says. “Bereavement is a lifelong sentence, whatever you do.” Firth is not a double of the whippet-thin Swire but his performance catches the essence of the Eton-educated GP whose faith in the establishment he came from is gradually destroyed. “Colin Firth came to see us,” says Swire. “We liked him very much. No swollen head, just a very ordinary bloke. He’s said since in interviews how unusual it was, the interface he felt between us. I was very pleased to hear that.”
Catherine McCormack, Dr Jim Swire, Jane Swire and Colin Firth. Dave Benett/Getty Images for Sky UK
Scottish police originally believed the bombing was carried out in revenge for the US Navy shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 in July 1988, an attack that took 290 lives – it was thought the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC), had placed the bomb on a feeder flight at Frankfurt at the Iranians’ request. But that line of inquiry was dropped. Instead, American and British prosecutors identified Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, based in Malta at the time of the explosion (where they said the bomb had originated), as the chief suspect.
In May 2000 al-Megrahi and alleged accomplice Lamin Khalifah were brought to trial at a specially convened Scottish court at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, an arrangement negotiated between the British and Libyan authorities. The case seemed convincing. Al-Megrahi had been identified by a Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, as a customer who bought clothes that were found in the wreckage. An FBI expert identified a fragment of circuit board as part of a batch supplied to the Libyan intelligence service by a company based in the same Zurich office block that al-Megrahi used on visits to Switzerland.
Jim Swire, representative of the relatives of the Lockerbie victims, speaks to reporters outside the building of the High Court of Justiciary March 14, 2002 at Kamp van Zeist, The Netherlands. Paul Vreeker/Getty Images
Watching the trial, Swire found himself sitting near the family of al-Megrahi. “Before the evidence had begun to be heard, some of the other relatives said to me, ‘How can you bear to sit near those bastards?’ There was this terrible presumption of guilt.” But for Swire and others the evidence didn’t stack up; Gauci’s story changed, the origin of the circuit-board fragment was doubtful. Nonetheless, al-Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Convinced of al-Megrahi’s innocence, Swire visited him in Glasgow’s Barlinnie Prison and, as we see in the drama, encouraged him to mount appeals that would gain al-Megrahi’s release and help Swire prove the official version was wrong. Then, in 2009, al-Megrahi, who by then had advanced prostate cancer, dropped his latest appeal as part of the negotiations that allowed him to go home on compassionate grounds. It was a setback for Swire but one he accepts. “I have no problem with forgiving al-Megrahi for dropping his appeal,” he says. “The man was dying. He knew he was dying.”
The Daily Mirror reports on the bombing. Daily Mirror
Swire’s visit to the ailing al-Megrahi in Libya further angered American families who believe in his guilt, but Swire’s own family has been angered, too, and in 2024 Cathy Swire revealed her unhappiness with her father’s campaigning. Does he regret the hurt to other people? “Am I being selfish in continuing with this campaign? One of the most difficult consequences is that it has had diabolical effects on one member of my family I won’t name. I deeply regret this has been a side effect of my very selfish, very intense, 36-year attempt to get to the truth. It’s one of the difficult factors. It can split people.”
He adds, “But it’s very difficult to know what one should do with a ghastly business like losing a beautiful, highly intelligent girl like Flora. How can you justify what you’re doing? What I’ve been doing is challenging the official version all these years. That version prevents me from having any chance of talking to those who really were behind it, because we’re expected to believe, ‘Oh, it’s simple. It was the Libyans.’”
What would he say to the bombers? “One of the things some of us might want to do is say, ‘OK, maybe you were given the go-ahead to do this by your religion and your natural desire for revenge. You’ve got what you wanted in that sense, but was that a good road to go down? What did it actually achieve?’ And I don’t know the answer to that question, because I’m not a politician. I’m a naive GP from the middle of England.”
Colin Firth as Jim Swire in Lockerbie: A Search for Truth. SKY/Carnival
In part his campaign has been driven by the many anomalies in the case; perhaps most galling the missed chance to save lives. “The plane flew in the week before Christmas and was incredibly empty compared to most other planes. Why?” he asks. “One of the things that makes it so difficult is that America received a very accurate warning on 5 December 1988. A lot of American staffers in embassies had cancelled their bookings on Pan Am. And why wouldn’t they, if they knew there was a risk specifically to Pan Am, specifically at Frankfurt Airport?”
He remains convinced that blaming Colonel Gaddafi (who he once, famously, met in the desert) and Libya was a false-flag operation so the US could avoid antagonising Iran while they were negotiating the release of hostages in Lebanon, held by pro-Iranian Hezbollah. But he seems no nearer to convincing the world that Iran ordered the Lockerbie bombing, and this year the Libyan Abu Agila Masud will go on trial in the US, charged with making the bomb.
Swire is pleased with the drama. "I saw, in the eyes of the crew making this series, that they came around to understanding what it was they were dealing with,” he says. But does he think it will help his campaign? “We might, as the result, be granted an inquiry into how the disaster has been handled in Britain, and that inquiry might lead to conclusions saying, ‘This is awful. What really happened was Iran did it.’
“But what traditionally happens in this country after you’ve done that? They don’t make the changes the inquiry recommends. I’m not sure that I trust the way in which our country functions in situations like this. So, what I’m wondering very seriously is whether one should look for a source outside Britain – something like the International Criminal Court – because there is so much information that negates the official version.”
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As we part, I ask if the long fight against what others see as overwhelming evidence has ever assuaged the grief of losing Flora. “I’ve always been well aware that my way of coping with what happened that night is to try and find out what really happened. I feel confident that Flora would have wanted me to do that, but she would not have wanted me to become a bigot or obsessed with warping facts to fit a theory. She’d have wanted me to be honest and truthful. And had she been allowed to live I would have been able to turn to her and say, ‘Look, I did my best.’”
Authors
Michael Hodges
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