Pan Am flight 103 disaster

▪ terrorist bombing, 1988

      terrorist (terrorism) bombing of a passenger airliner operated by Pan American World Airways (Pan American World Airways, Inc.) (Pan Am) on Dec. 21, 1988, that killed 270 people.

      About 7:00 PM on December 21, Pan Am flight 103, a Boeing 747 en route to New York City from London, exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. The plane had reached a height of approximately 31,000 feet (9,500 metres) and was preparing for the oceanic portion of the flight when a timer-activated bomb detonated. The bomb, constructed with the odourless plastic explosive Semtex, was hidden in a cassette player that was stored in a suitcase. The impact of the blast broke the plane into thousands of pieces that landed in an area covering roughly 850 square miles (2,200 square km). All 259 passengers and crew members were killed. Falling wreckage destroyed 21 houses and killed an additional 11 people on the ground.

      Although the passengers aboard the plane came from 21 countries, the majority of them were Americans, and the attack increased terrorism fears in the United States. Investigators believed that two Libyan intelligence agents were responsible for the bombing; many speculated that the attack had been retaliation for a 1986 U.S. bombing campaign against Libya's capital city, Tripoli. However, Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi (Qaddafi, Muammar al-) refused to turn over the two suspects. As a result, the United States and the United Nations Security Council imposed economic sanctions against Libya. In 1998 Qaddafi finally accepted a proposal to extradite the men. In 2001, after an investigation that involved interviewing 15,000 people and examining 180,000 pieces of evidence, ʿAbd al-Baset al-Megrahi was convicted of the bombing and sentenced to life in prison. The other man, Lamin Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted. The Libyan government eventually agreed to pay damages to the families of victims of the attack.

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