Pan Am Flight 103 Bombed - Dec. 21, 1988

A bomb exploded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 on this day in 1988.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Hello and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and it's December
twenty one. A bomb exploded aboard PanAm flight one oh

(00:25):
three on this day in over the town of Lockerby, Scotland.
This was a Boeing seven forty seven that had taken
off from London thirty eight minutes before, and it was
bound for New York. All two fifty nine people aboard
the aircraft were killed, as were eleven people on the
ground as the wreckage from the plane crashed into houses

(00:45):
and streets in Lockerbee. The victims aboard the aircraft included
thirty five students who were studying abroad through Syracuse University,
as well as people from numerous other nations. The following day,
authorities announced that it appeared that the explosion may have
been an act of sabotage, not some kind of an accident.

(01:07):
Authorities also released a warning that day, known as the
Helsinki warning. This was an anonymous phone call to the
US Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and the phone call had
said that a terrorist organization maybe using an unsuspecting passenger
to smuggle a bomb onto a pan Am flight. Although
there were uncanny similarities between this warning and the bombing

(01:28):
of flight one oh three, it was determined that they
were unrelated. Although people were outraged when they learned that
this warning had existed and they had known nothing about it,
soon it was announced that there had been a bomb
in the airplane's forward luggage compartment. The bomb was hidden
in a tape recorder and placed in an uncompanied bag
in Malta that had been transferred to a PanAm flight

(01:52):
to London after landing in Germany, and then from there
onto a flight bound for New York. Two suspects emerged, Abdelbaset,
Ali Mohammed al mcgrahi and al Amine Khalifa Fema, both
of them of Libya. They were indicted on November thirteenth
of n They worked for Libyan Arab Airlines and they

(02:13):
were also accused of being Libyan intelligence agents. At first,
though Libya refused to extradite them to Scotland to stand trial,
and this led the United Nations to impose sanctions on Libya.
Libyan leader MoMA Ga Daffi also wanted the trial to
take place in a neutral country, so part of an
air base outside of Amsterdam was declared Scottish territory so

(02:35):
that the trial could be held under Scottish law. It
was only after this was agreed to that Libya finally
agreed on December sixteenth to turn the suspects over. This
was more than seven years after the indictment, and then
it was April of the following year by the time
the suspects were actually handed over to UN authorities to

(02:56):
stand trial. The trial began on May three, two thousand
and There were three judges, with the fourth as a reserve.
After hearing eight months of testimony from two d two witnesses,
they issued their verdict on January thirty feet of two
thousand one. Al McGraw he was found guilty and Fema

(03:16):
was found not guilty. Al McGraw he appealed, but that
appeal failed and eight years later he received a compassionate
release when he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. He
died in twenty twelve. A little less than three years
after that release, in two thousand three, Libya took formal
responsibility for this bombing after years of insisting that Libya

(03:40):
as a nation was not involved. Although Gaddafi himself did
not take personal responsibility for it, Getafee did agree to
a two point seven billion dollar settlement to be paid
to the families of those who were killed. Other suspects
were announced to exist in twenty fifteen, and there continued
to be a lot of hyper hotheses about this bombing,

(04:01):
about who was involved, whether it was some kind of
multinational conspiracy, but no one else has ever been convicted.
It is certain that there were other people involved. In
response to the bombing, there was increased airport security all
over the world. The f a A also find pan
Am due to security breaches that had happened on the

(04:22):
day of the bombing. Thanks to Eve's Jeff Cope for
her research work on today's show, Into Casey Pegram and
Chandler Maize for their audio work on this show. You
can subscribe to This Day in History Class on Apple Podcasts,
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an infamous and wrongful conviction