The deadliest terrorist attack in British history. #britishhistory #history #historyshorts

On the evening of 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 departed Heathrow bound for New York. Thirty-eight minutes into the flight, at 31,000 feet above the Scottish town of Lockerbie, a bomb hidden inside a cassette player in the forward cargo hold exploded. The aircraft broke apart in less than one second. The crew had no time to send a distress call. 270 people died — 259 on board and 11 Lockerbie residents killed on the ground in their homes. The wing section, carrying 200,000 pounds of jet fuel, struck Sherwood Crescent at 500 miles per hour. The fireball rose 300 feet. The crater was 140 feet long, 40 feet deep, and registered as a seismic event miles away. Fifteen houses were destroyed and two of the residents killed inside them were never found. Wreckage fell across 845 square miles of Scottish countryside — the largest crime scene ever created. The investigation was led by Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, then the smallest mainland police force in Britain, with fewer than 300 officers. Over three years, investigators conducted 15,000 interviews and collected 180,000 pieces of evidence. A fragment of scorched shirt found months after the crash in a Scottish field contained a sliver of circuit board traced to a Libyan-made timer. In 1991 arrest warrants were issued for two Libyan intelligence officers. Neither was surrendered for eight years. The trial was held in the Netherlands in 2000, under Scottish law, before three Scottish judges with no jury. One man, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted and sentenced to life. His co-accused was acquitted. Megrahi always maintained his innocence and died in 2012. In 2022 a third man — Abu Agela Mas’ud, believed to have built the bomb — was arrested and charged. The case is still open. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in British history. The people of Lockerbie washed, dried and ironed every piece of clothing recovered from the wreckage that wasn’t needed as forensic evidence, so that as much as possible could be returned to the victims’ families.
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Видео The deadliest terrorist attack in British history. #britishhistory #history #historyshorts канала Ben Fox