Original subtitles

The following programme contains distressing scenes.

MARGARET: That night...

we wondered why they were racing through from one field to another.

We thought, 'What has scared the sheep?'

HUGH: We were very lucky there was no sheep killed,

with all the... Everything that came down... everything coming down.

This is the red suitcase.

That was quite the thing to see.

Well, there's the house.

That's how near it was. These things were all in front of the house, yeah.

That's a trolley, I think, a food trolley.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that was the door.

That we found, yeah.

We just thought,

'Just a few hours before,

'they'd all gone in that door, hadn't they?'

And here, it's lying amongst them.

Yeah.

TV: Pan Am Flight 103 crashed into the Scottish village of Lockerbie.

270 lives lost.

It was Britain's worst ever air crash.

REAGAN: (TV) We have no knowledge of how this accident happened.

We're trying to find out.

MAN 1: It was an attack on America.

MAN 2: Largest crime scene in history.

MAN 3:200,000 pieces of evidence.

JIM: My daughter hadn't died in an accident -

she has been brutally murdered.

MAN 4: They killed our children. MAN 5: To be lied to for 30 years

MAN 6: I think the US Government had an agenda.

GADDAFI: Reagan is the biggest terrorist in the world.

VICTORIA: If it's up to our government,

we might not ever know the truth.

MAN: Nothing is what it seems in the Lockerbie story.

JIM: Come on. Come on.

Sit, there's a good boy.

You stay there.

You stay there, OK.

'Both my grannies came from the Isle of Skye.

'And Flora - my daughter Flora -

'was very fond of Skye, she used to come up here whenever she could.'

INTERVIEWER: That's a picture of her...

'just behind you on the wall over there isn't it?

That is her attending the Skye Ball.

She was a very striking girl.

Very easy to talk to

and to get to know.

And she used to make her own dresses...

and not because I pushed her.

But she finally decided to go into medicine.

And she was actually part way through her medical training.

She was just on the eve

of her 24th birthday that year, 1988.

She rang up to ask us if we minded

if she went over to America...

to meet her boyfriend over Christmas.

And of course, um,

not being total ogres, we said, 'Yes if that's what you want to do'.

Everything was booked up, except there were plenty of seats available

on a certain flight known as Pan Am 103...

which is why we're talking now.

(DOG BARKS)

COLIN: Before, you know, 1988,

no-one had really ever heard of Lockerbie.

It was dotted on the A74, on the way to Glasgow.

You might have had a stop-in at the chip shop for a bite to eat, maybe.

Life here was...

just... undramatic, you know?

The 21st of December 1988

will stay with me forever.

It was three months into my police career,

I was just about to turn 19.

And I happened to be the youngest recruit in Scotland at the time too.

Got into the car about... twenty to seven,

to be at a Christmas party just outside the town.

(DOG BARKS)

We were actually plucking turkeys for Christmas. (LAUGHS)

So, we had help, and we were all sitting round the table

having our supper, through in the kitchen.

HUGH: It was a dark, - windy night, yeah. - It was.

DAVE: I was only 17.

Basically, we were just sitting watching the television.

My father was away, getting a turkey for Christmas.

('THIS IS YOUR LIFE' THEME TUNE PLAYS)

I think we were watching 'This is Your Life'.

(PLANE ENGINE REVS OVERHEAD)

(TV BACKGROUND CHATTER)

TV: Now, we're planning to give a Christmas surprise to the man

who, 40 years ago,

brought this loveable character to life.

And it was three minutes past seven.

(TV AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

I can always remember three minutes past seven that night.

ASPEL: (ON TV) And I'm here to say, Harry Corbett, 'This is Your Life'.

PETER: I heard this loud noise. (DOG BARKS)

We heard, like, banging bang, bang, bang.

(BIRDS SQUAWK)

And the pheasants were all shouting.

(BIRD SQUAWKS)

So, we all jumped up, looked out the window.

There was like a great big mushroom ball of fire.

You could see the thing just over the hill,

that was just sort of coming out of Lockerbie.

There was glass. (CAR ALARM WAILS)

Oh my God.

Unbelievable.

Everywhere.

(POLICE RADIO CHATTER AND SIREN WAILS)

WOMAN: (ON RADIO) Over.

MAN: Come on, Jack.

Over.

MAN: (ON RADIO) Over.

COLIN: I thought I was witnessing some kind of chemical tanker crash

on the A74 ahead of me.

And then a sergeant emerged out of the smoke,

and he said, 'Colin, there's a hole in the road in Sherwood Crescent.

'You'd better go to the police station and sign on'.

Move back please folks, live electricity cable.

We thought it was a military aircraft,

because they were still practising in the dark, you see.

We just thought, 'Oh, my goodness, one of them boys have crashed.'

WOMAN: We seen the house lighting up.

Keith has gone to the door. 'Just shut it cos it's too frightening.'

Oh, my God, it was terrible.

And then sparks, and then the whole thing went down.

(STUTTERS) Oh, I didn't know what was happening.

Like, I just got a fright. Shaking, I was.

(SIREN WAILS IN DISTANCE)

People were completely numb and confused.

Why was there a huge explosion at one end of the town,

and why was the other end of the town also affected?

It didn't initially make any sense.

After supper, we just set off down the hill.

Here's stuff lying on the side of the road.

And we had took one look, and we thought,

'This has been no military plane'.

We could tell, it must have been a passenger.

And you were guessing how many people maybe was on that plane.

And you would think,

'My goodness! How many hundreds of people are in mourning right now?'

REPORTER: (ON TV) Before we go,

we have an unconfirmed report from the Ministry of Defence

that a Boeing 747 airliner -

we know only that it's a civilian airliner -

has crashed in the Lockerbie area of Dumfriesshire.

We don't know what airline,

but the report makes it plain that it is a civilian airliner.

JIM: I was making a Christmas calendar,

to send out to members of the family.

And I was suddenly and abruptly called by my wife Jane,

because, on the television,

there was this message about a terrible disaster

happening in the borders between Scotland and England.

And Jane concluded immediately that...

Flora was on that plane.

(POLICE RADIO CHATTER)

MAN: Aircraft involved, a Pan Am 747.

VICTORIA: The radio reported that a Pan American flight

had disappeared from radar.

Flight 103.

And I said to my mother,

'Oh that's the flight that John's gonna come home on tomorrow'.

(SIREN WHOOPS)

And I said, you know, 'Those families...

'..they're never gonna be the same again'.

And, um...

and so everybody bowed their head.

And we...

we just had our moment of silence,

and a bit of a prayer...

and, um, I didn't realise that, you know,

I was really praying for myself and...

and my family and... I never imagined that,

you know, um, this...

this was something that I would ever be...

a part of.

DAVID: I was working for Radio Forth in Edinburgh.

Fortunately, I found someone in the radio station -

who comes from the area -

and was able to navigate me right into the middle of the town.

INTERVIEWER: So, you were one of the first journalists on the ground?

Yeah. I would imagine so, yes.

(SIREN WAILS)

The first thing you noticed was an overwhelming...

stink of aviation fuel filled the whole town.

It was such a bizarre scene, because it was so close to Christmas.

There was no electricity, obviously the lights in the houses were out.

But the light of the flames, you could...

quite clearly see Christmas trees and Christmas decorations.

It was really hard to comprehend...

exactly what had happened.

I mean, Imagine when I said,

'Oh the golf course is covered in bodies, apparently'.

You're kind of built in to dismiss that,

you'd think 'Oh that can't be true',

you know, 'it's obviously just small town exaggeration',

and, of course, it's exactly what... what had happened.

The golf course was covered in bodies.

MAN: There have been no survivors reported from the crashed aircraft.

And we're waiting for Dr Hill to give us an official 'stand down'.

He's not prepared to do so,

because they still have several helicopters flying around the area,

bringing in casualties.

But so far as I can make out,

these casualties are...

are corpses.

And I think we could quite safely say -

to those who have turned up voluntarily -

we probably won't require their services.

And thank you very much for coming out.

JIM: Very early on the morning, not long after dawn had broken...

we flew out to Lockerbie.

DAVID: (ON DEVICE) There's an enormous hole in the ground

where Pan Am Flight 103...

is thought to have made its first contact with the ground.

It must be about 30 feet deep,

and, on either side of the hole,

houses are absolutely shattered.

And as we move over Lockerbie, you can see the trail of devastation -

wreaked by the 747 -

as it bounced and burnt its way across the town.

We're now flying right out along the trail of the wreckage and debris.

The fields here are littered with what are easily recognisable

as parts of the fuselage and wings...

of the 747...

stretching out in a seemingly straight line of death.

I've been told that the crew were found strapped in their seats,

in the cockpit.

Gosh.

Yeah.

(SIGHS) Yeah, it was a...

it was, you know, an image you just won't forget.

And we were low enough to, you know,

to quite clearly see features and...

see that people were...

to all intents and purposes, just, you know, sitting out in the grass.

But of course, they were all dead.

HUGH: The body we found...

would be the furthest from Lockerbie,

the furthest away from the crash site.

MARGARET: Mm-hm.

It looked like a young person.

A full head of hair and... Black hair.

Black, shiny hair, yeah.

He was lying on the ground with a sheet on top of him.

You desperately wanted to know who he was.

And we were thinking about a young wife...

maybe children, parents.

You know, you started trying to put a picture together.

Aye.

We developed quite a love for 'our - boy', as we called him. - Yes, aye.

You know...

we didn't know who he was... No... at all.

But you got attached to him in some way.

For nearly 24 hours, we were...

keeping an eye on him up there, you know.

Just about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the next afternoon,

before they came for the man.

(SHEEP BLEAT)

DAVE: My father came back, past Tundergarth Church,

where the cockpit was and...

he said that we would go out and see.

(RADIO CHATTER) People were going home for Christmas.

So, there was Christmas presents and luggage and...

obviously, the...

the bodies.

We found a toddler, just over that hedge,

in that... in the next field.

She was just this little girl with blonde, blonde hair.

It's the one thing that sticks in my mind.

My father didnae want the bodies getting attacked

by foxes or wildlife.

We were out in the pickup truck, and we just lifted them,

and we took them into Lockerbie.

We were trying to do what we could do to help.

TV: Police and rescue services have so far recovered about 150 bodies.

60 of them were found on a golf course.

About 40 others found on a housing estate.

And, again, about another 50 on another housing estate.

Most of the bodies lie where police and rescue services found them,

covered by tarpaulins.

My father, he never really talked about it.

I suppose the death and the bodies

maybe just affected him a bit more is what it was.

But, in them days, it was just basically you had to deal with,

get on and deal with it yourself, that was just what it was.

(CHATTER)

INTERVIEWER: Wow, oh my gosh.

Aye.

Point me out Ella Ramsden's house?

That one there. Just the end one there.

That's it.

REPORTER: Memories of the night disaster came to No 71 Park Place

will never leave the woman who lived there.

Ella Ramsden scrambled from the wreckage clutching her dog.

Her budgie was rescued later by a fireman.

I'm so sorry for the people that have died,

and their families.

More difficult for them.

I've only lost a house, that's all.

And just... (SIGHS)

(RADIO CHATTER)

REPORTER: It's now more than 12 hours since Britain's worst air disaster.

It's now known that 258 people died on the plane.

Eleven local people, including three children, are still missing,

and are now presumed dead.

As far as I know, I've lost my brother-in-law,

my sister-in-law,

and their house is just... there's just a 30-foot crater.

I cannae even find the house.

It's... It's gone like.

DAVID: In Sherwood Crescent,

where the wing full of aviation fuel hit the ground and exploded...

that's where the people on the ground were killed.

And of course some of the bodies were never found.

They were completely vapourised.

The houses were vapourised such as the intensity of the explosion.

THATCHER: It is even worse in daylight...

than it looked on television at night.

And the number of houses that are damaged,

Um, and...

the people in them must've wondered just whatever was happening.

As indeed the people in the aircraft must've...

had this, well...

it was just terrible.

JANE: People get on planes...

like we used to take buses when I was a child.

And, so, we never saw any...

danger in Flora... going to America.

JIM: They put a number up, you know the way it is.

Heathrow, I couldn't get through to at all.

And eventually, we ended up ringing the Pan Am desk in New York.

They were able to tell us that Flora was on that flight.

And at the same time, we could hear chaos in the background.

And you could hear women screaming.

MAN: Whoa! (WOMAN SCREAMS)

(WAILING) My baby!

A lot of American families had congregated at JFK Airport

to get the latest news on this crash.

Because most of the victims were American.

VICTORIA: I turned the TV back on.

And there was an 800 number that said, you know,

to call that number, and it was busy-busy.

And then finally, I, um...

got through.

I said, you know, 'I've been told my husband was on this flight'.

'Uh, what's his name? What's his nationality?'

I'm desperate. I'm saying, 'Why are you asking me all these questions?

'I just need to know if John Cummock was on the flight or wasn't he'.

And they started taking all this different information,

and they said, 'Well, really, we can't confirm anything right now'.

I said, 'So, you can't confirm if he was on the flight?

'And you can't confirm that this plane has crashed?'

And, um, they said, 'No, um, we're just taking information right now'.

And I said: 'How cruel is this?'

I said, you know, 'I have three little children'.

John happened to be in London on business.

And every day, we would always talk.

He called me first thing on December 21st.

We had talked about preparation for Christmas and the kids, you know,

waiting for Santa and daddy to come home.

And it was also going to be, uh...

when we were gonna be celebrating...

our youngest daughter's third birthday.

He made no mention that he was going to be changing his plans,

and trying to come home early and surprise us.

TV: Now, America's number one primetime news.

Evening, everyone. James Adams with Angela Robinson.

Thanks for joining us. Maurice is off tonight.

'It was literally raining fire'...

Of course, in the media, everything was about...

the flames and the wreckage.

With more than 250 people on board.

And in the foreground was all debris,

and there were, you know, bodies covered with orange tarps.

And in the right side of the foreground

was a brown attache case.

I'd given John that attache case for our anniversary,

on August 23rd of that year.

So, that photograph solidified to me

that he really was on board the plane.

That's how, really, my...

was the beginning of my nightmare.

(WEEPS) Um...

DICK: Generally speaking, 747s don't fall out of the sky.

So, the first suspicion was,

something bad happened to that plane.

The FBI, we had somebody in charge of the investigation...

that was me.

INTERVIEWER: I just want to actually start...

I just wanted to show you these pictures.

These were actually taken by a colleague of yours.

Oh, yeah, I know about these pictures... some of them.

I remember seeing the seats, yeah.

(SIGHS) That shoe...

we had a picture of that shoe...

on our office wall in Washington.

Sort of a reminder.

We weren't doing this for ourselves, we were doing it for them...

and we devoted resources to finding out what happened.

We have a requirement to...

obtain the very best evidence that we can,

to allow us to try and find a cause...

of the accident.

Uh, or if it is an accident.

To do that, we have to carry out a very meticulous search.

The Scottish police had resources.

They were a very civilised, well-trained,

excellent police agency.

REPORTER: Hundreds of police, from forces throughout Scotland,

are now involved in the search for debris.

Reports are coming in, from far and wide, of further sightings.

From the very first night,

they treated it like a crime scene,

with the goal of first bringing in all of the bodies

and all the aircraft parts.

So, we asked, 'We would like to work with you',

recognising they are in charge of the investigation.

And the FBI is not used to not being in charge.

Um, I have been appointed as the investigator in charge

for this particular accident.

There obviously are a number of potential causes

for an in-flight breakup.

We are looking for evidence...

to try and find the point at which...

things first started to go wrong.

REPORTER: Pan Am Flight 103 began in Frankfurt,

then passengers changed planes at Heathrow

for the flight on to New York.

Over Lockerbie, the crew went silent.

TV: It didn't look as though the pilot was in any particular trouble.

No trouble at all. They were having normal conversations.

And then suddenly, the plane disappeared.

COLIN: The aircraft was flying at a bearing of about 320 degrees.

Kind of northwest-ish, at 31,000 feet.

At 07:02pm and a few seconds,

the nose cone rips off the front of the aircraft.

TB: Investigators will want to see if there was any evidence

of a sudden cabin depressurisation,

that could be caused by a massive technical failure,

or by a bomb explosion.

Whatever happened to this plane may have started about in here,

an area of the plane where a cargo hold runs underneath.

At that point, it starts to plummet

and dive directly towards the town.

But because it was quite windy that night,

as the aircraft breaks up,

the lighter things blew much further east.

The debris field extended, in fact,

as far as the east coast of England,

right into Northumbria.

All of that debris field

had to be searched, systematically.

Field by field, tree by tree.

600 plus searchers had to gather each morning.

DICK: It was humongous.

845 square miles.

The largest crime scene in history.

REAGAN: I wanna express our sorrow and our concern

for the families and friends of those who died in the crash

of the Pan American flight 103.

Christmas is a special time for the young...

for those who carry the twin promises of hopes and dreams.

And on this flight were the hopes and dreams of many young people,

including the tragic loss of so many students from Syracuse University.

A tragedy that steals the hopes and dreams from our society

magnifies the loss... to our society.

May God be with them.

MAN: As at half-past three this afternoon,

the temporary mortuary at the town hall is now full.

We have opened a second mortuary at the ice rink at Lockerbie Ice Rink,

where in total we have now received,

between the two mortuaries, 150 bodies.

We have, as yet, no positive, formal identifications.

JIM: I had spoken to the guy

who had been put in charge of the post-mortems of the bodies.

And I said, 'Look, I'm a doc too,

'and I want to see my daughter's body.'

And he said, 'I understand, I'll fix it.

'Come to the ice rink'.

And by the time... I got there,

he and the men with him had taken Flora's body -

from amongst all the others -

and put it aside in a little alcove with, um...

some flowers there and things.

(SIGHS) But, um...

she'd been so damaged.

She hadn't been damaged by the explosion on the plane,

but mainly by impact with the ground,

which had so altered her face and her head that she...

well, she was barely recognisable.

I asked him if, um...

if I could look at her left foot,

because she had a little pigmented spot on her big toe.

So, the cloth was taken off her.

I looked at her feet.

There was the spot...

on her undamaged foot.

JANE: I didn't want to see her when she had been killed.

I wanted to remember her as...

I had last seen her.

Full of life.

INTERVIEWER: And Flora was your firstborn?

She was. Yes. And...

you know, she was...

everything that a parent could wish for.

Beautiful, bright, lively, intelligent, yeah.

And, we were very proud of her.

A very kind guy who was organising all this for me...

said, 'Anything else I can do?'

So, I said, 'Yes. 'Could I have a lock of her hair?'

He was kind enough to do that.

Human kindness can be very important when these things happen.

VICTORIA: The immediate need that I had, and a lot of the other families

was to find out how to get our loved ones identified,

and how to get them home.

The US State Department was supposed to be helping us...

but they weren't.

Our government abdicated... all their responsibility and role

of, um, crisis management and assistant

to the victims' families to Pan Am.

And so here's Pan Am, who...

is really circling the wagons thinking,

'Oh well we might be sued, or whatever'.

And they weren't helping us at all.

DAVID: No-one does come to Lockerbie with clean hands.

There's so many twists and turns in this whole story,

from the very first day that it happens.

People trying to get off the hook, you know?

The insurers trying to pass the buck.

The airline trying to save itself.

It was just a mass of people.

There were people from the FBI.

Obviously.

There were also people from murkier ends of...

of the US intelligence community...

on the ground there, as you would expect.

You know, I just don't understand why they would bother denying it.

But they do to this day.

Nothing is what it seems in the Lockerbie story.

You know, nothing quite adds up.

JIM: The flight on which Flora got her seat at the last minute

was only two-thirds full.

How many flights, two or three days before Christmas,

to the States, are only two-thirds full?

Answer - only those fights where people have been warned off.

She wasn't warned off.

Nobody told us.

INTERVIEWER: What was the 'Helsinki Warning'?

Yeah. We did some filming with Jim Swire,

and he still remains angry about it.

DICK: Yeah. And I understand that.

I totally understand that and he's right.

In early December,

someone called the US Embassy in Helsinki

and made a threat.

Within two weeks' time,

someone will carry a bomb on board a Pan Am flight

from Frankfurt to the United States.

People working for US agencies

were made aware of that warning...

and were given the chance

to make alternative arrangements.

Whereas the normal travelling public weren't given that chance.

The American authorities

put notices up on the noticeboards of their embassies,

telling them that there'd been a terrorist threat to this flight,

and they might want to avoid then to get home for Christmas, you see -

to their families in the United States.

The sabotage theory was given further weight this morning,

when it emerged that American diplomats in Europe...

were warned that a Pan Am plane could be a terrorist target.

Interpol warned airlines and police authorities in 147 countries,

including Britain.

VICTORIA: There were over ten bomb warnings on these flights.

And we wanted to know who got the warnings

and what did our government do about it?

WOMAN: We receive dozens of threats each day.

We notified the people who have responsibility for security.

DICK: If nothing else, it looked bad.

'We protect ourselves. We don't protect you'.

And I feel that we had a responsibility

to let everybody know there was this potential threat.

Such a public statement,

with nothing more to go on than an anonymous telephone call...

you'd literally have closed down the air traffic in the world.

REPORTER: Mr Reagan... (AUDIO DAMPENS SPEECH)

No.

Obviously, Pan Am wasn't mandated

to enhance security, search the plane,

or warn the passengers.

But what really petrified all of us

is that this was going to happen to somebody else.

And we didn't want any American -

anybody - to go through what we had gone through.

JIM: All I was after was the truth.

I felt I had a right to know the truth

about how my daughter had come to be killed.

And why she wasn't protected against being killed.

And those were the bases in which we very soon found...

we were being ritually and profusely deceived by the authorities.

MICK: A number of items of wreckage, passenger baggage

and part of the framework of a metal luggage pallet...

are being examined by Ministry of Defence scientists.

Each of these will be subjected

to lengthy chemical and metallurgical forensic examination.

However...

it has been established

that two parts of the metal luggage pallet's framework...

show conclusive evidence...

of a detonating high explosive.

Much investigative work remains to be done

to establish the nature of the explosive device,

what it was contained in,

its location in the aircraft,

and the sequence of events...

immediately following its detonation.

From what you've heard, you'll understand that this operation

has developed into a criminal inquiry...

of international dimensions.

There is no doubt anymore, the 259 passengers and crew

of Flight 103 were killed by a bomb.

DICK: Within a week, we knew

that it was a terrorist attack against the United States -

and against an American carrier - that killed 270 people.

What we wanna do is find out who did it.

And bring them to justice, you bet.

At the time, it was the biggest terrorist attack

against the United States in history.

And of course, you have to think what was the logic and the reason?

BRUCE: The mid-1980s were really a remarkable time,

in terms of international terrorism.

Virtually every day, there was some news of some new terrorist attack,

airplane hijackings, airplane bombings,

attacks on embassies, assassinations of individuals.

And there was a veritable alphabet soup of terrorist groups.

There was ANO, the Abu Nidal Organization,

PFLP, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLPGC -

the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine General Command -

the Provisional Irish Republican Army, PIRA, Hezbollah.

(MAN YELLS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

(CROWD CHANTS) And it sort of the fed the anonymity.

Like, who were these people? Who was behind them?

Why were they doing these things?

And it's often very hard to find clear answers.

Or the certainty that we wish we could attach to terrorist incidents,

that exist in the rest of the world.

But we have to understand, just like in physics,

every action has a reaction.

There was a war going on in the Middle East between Iran and Iraq.

And the US government

had gone at the request of the government of Kuwait,

and put American flags on tankers coming out of Kuwait,

bringing oil to the West.

SAILOR: (ON RADIO) You're approaching a US Navy warship,

bearing zero-nine-zero, five nautical miles from you.

USS Vincennes was a navy ship,

that was sent into the Persian Gulf,

to protect those Kuwaiti tankers.

And we told both Iran and Iraq,

'Any attack on any one of these Kuwaiti tankers

'is an attack on the United States'.

REPORTER: It was July the 3rd.

And the cruiser Vincennes was on patrol,

in the northern straits of Hormuz.

(RADIO CHATTER)

(SHIP HORN BLASTS)

By mid-morning though the picture had changed for the worse.

A total of 13 Iranian gun boats were sighted in the area,

and the Vincennes sighted two of them closing fast.

Got a visual on the... (AUDIO DROWNS SPEECH) MAN: 29.

Coming inbound fast.

Three-five-zero inbound.

Three five zero relative... (AUDIO DROWNS SPEECH) Relative.

(GUN FIRES)

(AUDIO DROWNS SPEECH)

Zero-zero-four troop, 21 miles.

BRUCE: The USS Vincennes...

thought the plane was a suicide attack against the ship.

(RADIO CHATTER) Oh, dead!

We had him. God, that was a dead-on!

DICK: But...

it was an Iran airbus, a commercial flight.

Flight 655, killing everyone on board.

TV: The United States has admitted it shot down an Iranian airliner

over the Gulf early this morning.

The Iranians say 290 people were on board,

66 of them children.

And they say 110 bodies have been recovered so far.

MAN: This has not been a mistake.

This was cold-blooded murder.

(WAILING)

By definition, it was an act of terrorism,

which I hope you agree that should be severely punished.

REAGAN: I won't minimise the tragedy we all know that it was a tragedy.

But we're talking about an incident in which a plane -

on radar -

was observed coming in the direction of a ship in combat.

So, I think it was an understandable accident,

to shoot and think that they were under attack from that plane.

MAN: We will, of course, in due course,

have our own response to the American crimes.

INTERVIEWER: Would it be a military response?

Well, I do not disclose what kind of response...

would be from our side.

But naturally, a prepared and measured response

to the magnitude of the crime.

(CROWD CHANTING) Down, down USA, down, down USA, down, down USA.

DICK: We knew that the government of Iran

were very angry at the United States.

But they were not the only country.

(MEN SPEAK IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

We had a whole list of others,

who we felt could well have been involved.

In the universe of terrorism and state sponsors of terrorism,

there's no shortage of suspects, with renegade or rogue countries,

such as Iran and Iraq, Libya, Syria,

sponsoring terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy.

And to attempt to develop a system of cut-outs

to obscure their involvement...

so you don't have the smoking gun to justify military retaliation.

You need to have direct evidence.

But in January of 1989, the Scots hadn't even found all the suitcases.

They hadn't brought in all the aircraft parts.

And then in late January, early February...

we found a suitcase.

Many of the suitcases that fell 31,000 feet to the ground

would have been a great commercial - they fell intact.

You could take the clothes out, put them on and go to a meeting.

But this suitcase was in about 54 pieces and fragments.

We pretty much thought...

that suitcase contained the explosive -

the bomb that blew up the plane.

That suitcase was determined to be a Samsonite Silhouette 4000,

antique copper in colour.

JIM: It was in the hold of Pan Am 103,

where the bomb exploded and murdered my daughter.

The British authorities had been warned well before Lockerbie,

and had essentially done nothing.

VICTORIA: If it's up to our government,

we might not ever know why Pan Am 103...

was blown out of the sky.

Oh, I think I know...

who was responsible for killing her.

And I think I could prove it.

The families of accidental activists,

we wanted to make sure this didn't happen again - we wanted the truth.

EDWIN: I have written a short statement.

And, uh, I will start with this.

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