A Boeing 747 passenger aircraft belonging to the US airline Pan American World Airways (Pan Am) crashed in flames on the town of Lockerbie, near Dumfries in Scotland, on the evening of Dec. 21, 1988. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, as well as 11 people in the town, where the wings and most of the fuselage landed.
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Flight PA103 was en route from Heathrow Airport, London, to John F. Kennedy Airport, New York, and was flying at its normal cruising height of 31,000 feet when the explosion occurred.
British forensic investigators on Dec. 28 announced their finding that the crash had been due not to structural fatigue, as had been postulated at first, but to an explosion in the forward hold, caused by a plastic explosive such as the Czech-manufactured Semtex. By the end of January 1989, however, there were no conclusive indications as to who might have planted the bomb.
It was confirmed that the dead included Bernt Carlsson, the chief administrative officer of the United Nations Council for South-West Africa (Namibia), who was flying to New York for the signing of the Angola-Cuba-South Africa agreement on Namibian independence. Reports had also suggested that some senior US intelligence personnel had been on board, and The Independent of Feb. 3 reported that police had interviewed a Scottish local radio reporter about the source of his allegation that traces had been found of an explosive device planted in the luggage of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee returning from Beirut.
A memorial service for the dead was held in Lockerbie on Jan. 4, 1989, and was attended by the UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, as well as by Paul Channon, the Minister of Transport, Malcolm Rifkind, the Secretary of State for Scotland, and leading opposition politicians.
It was reported on Jan. 13 that the families of four US victims had filed suits against Pan Am in the US courts, seeking compensation of $30,000,000 each.
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