For more than 30 years, Dr Jim Swire has tried to live up to his daughter’s memory by pursuing a dogged campaign for the truth.
It was shortly before Christmas in 1988 when his life changed forever, when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded and fell out of the sky over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie.
Flora was one of the 259 passengers and crew who died either immediately or shortly after the bomb that was hidden in a suitcase went off. A further 11 people were killed when the plane’s wreckage hit their homes.
Jim, who was working as a GP when his 23-year-old daughter was killed, has long believed that the man held responsible for the bombing, Libyan former intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was innocent.
He visited him shortly before his death in 2012 and was told by the cancer sufferer: ‘I am going to a place where I hope soon to see Flora. I will tell her that her father is my friend.’
Jim is set to be portrayed by Colin Firth in a new Sky drama about the disaster. Firth was spotted on set amidst mock plane wreckage earlier this week.
For more than 30 years, Dr Jim Swire (above in 2015) has tried to live up to his daughter’s memory by pursuing a dogged campaign for the truth. It was shortly before Christmas in 1988 when his life changed forever, when Pan Am Flight 103 exploded and fell out of the sky over the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. Flora was one of the 259 passengers and crew who died either immediately or shortly after the bomb that was hidden in a suitcase went off
New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 had taken off from Heathrow in London. Above: The cockpit wreckage is examined by officers
Jim became the spokesman for the UK Families Flight 103 group and has spent years meeting experts and officials and has had independent reviews of the evidence undertaken.
The retired doctor, who is now in his late 80s and lives with his wife Jane in the Cotswolds, believes the Lockerbie bombmaker was a Jordanian who was a ‘double agent, or even a triple agent’, he previously said.
He believes that this man was a valuable CIA asset and so the US and British governments collaborated to pin the blame for Lockerbie on Libya.
A segment from his 2021 book, The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, was published in the Daily Mail.
Writing of the moment that his daughter’s death was confirmed, he said: ‘Into my mind came images of Flora’s walk, her hair, her face, her laughter.
Jim, who was working as a GP when his 23-year-old daughter was killed, has long believed that the man held responsible for the bombing, Libyan former intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi (above left, and right in 2009), was innocent
Jim is set to be portrayed by Colin Firth in a new Sky drama about the disaster. Firth was spotted on set amidst mock plane wreckage earlier this week
Dr Jim Swire and his wife Jane leaves the Department of Transport after meeting with then Transport Secretary Cecil Parkinson
The Lockerbie disaster has been re-created for an upcoming Sky drama. Above: Mock plane wreckage strewn on a street in an image taken yesterday in the nearby town of Bathgate
‘As the plane cracked open and a 500 mph wind impacted, what did she see and hear and feel? How long was she conscious?
‘Was there time for a single thought before death came? Had she been disfigured, dismembered?
‘My body shuddered as the questions encircled us like hungry demons.
‘A grey dawn arrived. The first day of a new existence passed. Friends phoned, then visited. What could they say?
‘Two hundred and seventy murders in a second — parents, sons, daughters, children, babes, entire families on the plane and in the town itself. Death on such a scale terrifies; people cannot comprehend it.’
Jim and his wife believe that their daughter, a neurology student who had just been accepted to do a PhD at Cambridge, would have gone on to great things.
Her body, along with many others, were held at the local ice rink in Lockerbie because the mortuary was not big enough to accommodate them.
In 1988, Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie in south-western Scotland, killing all 259 on board. Another 11 people died when wreckage hit their homes
Policemen searching through the wreckage after the crash of the Pam-Am Flight 103. Seen behind are bags of wreckage, which have been re-created for the new show
King Charles, then the Prince of Wales, views the devastation at Lockerbie
The Daily Mail’s coverage after the disaster on December 21, 1988
Jim used his authority as a doctor to track down the doctor doing the post-mortems, who let him see Flora’s body.
It had landed on a hillside, distorting her face. Jim wrote: ‘Our lovely Flora had been newly laid out away from the ice rink, away from the smell, in a tiny room with flowers all around. Beneath the white sheet, she seemed at peace.’
He confirmed her identity by examining her right big toe, which he knew bore a mole.
Shortly after seeing his daughter for the final time, Jim attended the memorial service in Lockerbie, at which then prime minister Margaret Thatcher was present with her husband Denis.
As well as doggedly pursuing the truth about the bombing, Jim campaigned to improve lax airline security.
Victims in the disaster were of 21 different nationalities. They included 190 Americans, 35 of whom were students from the University of Syracuse
One of the engines from Pan Am Flight 103 is seen embedded in a road in Lockerbie as police and residents look on
At one point, he even flew to America with a fake bomb made from marzipan in his luggage. He said no one challenged him.
When al-Megrahi went on trial in 2001, the guilty verdict led Jim to faint. He said he was left in ‘despair’.
Al-Megrahi was released from prison in 2009 on compassionate grounds because he was suffering from prostate cancer. He returned to Libya and died there six months after Jim visited him.
Another Libyan national, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, has been accused of making the Lockerbie bomb. He is awaiting trial in the US and has pleaded not guilty.
Jim told the Telegraph that he has ‘no interest’ in the prospect of Mas’ud’s conviction.
‘I know he didn’t make the bomb. I know who made the bomb,’ he said.
Yesterday, dramatic pictures showed how the Lockerbie wreckage has been re-created for the upcoming Sky drama, which is based on Jim’s book.
Pictures taken by Lockerbie resident Peter Giesecke the day following the disaster
The nose cone of the jet landed in a field. Above: Police near the remains of the nose
A policeman guards the wreckage of the nose of Pan Am Flight 103
The aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing is seen from the air in the days afterwards
The images showed the parts strewn across streets in the town of Bathgate, which is around 80 miles from Lockerbie.
Firth was spotted on set wearing a dark suit and black tie as he walked among the mock wreckage.
Victims in the disaster were of 21 different nationalities. They included 190 Americans, 35 of whom were students from the University of Syracuse.
The crime scene covered 845 square miles, including rural Tundergarth, where wreaths were laid outside Tundergarth Church – which sits opposite the field where the nose cone of the plane fell to the ground.
New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 had taken off from Heathrow in London.
The Lockerbie Bombing: The terror attack that killed 270 people
The Lockerbie bombing took place on December 21, 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky.
The New York-bound Boeing 747, named Maid of the Seas, was passing five miles above the Scottish town when the explosion tore it apart.
When first reports of a crash came through, many assumed it was a low-flying military training flight which had come to harm.
Flight 103 went down three minutes after 7pm, about half an hour after take-off from Heathrow, as it passed over the town heading out to the west.
The flight was running slightly late and should already have been out over the Atlantic en route to New York.
The cockpit section fell to earth at Tundergarth, about five miles out of town, landing in a field in rolling countryside within yards of a country church and graveyard.
The Lockerbie bombing took place on December 21, 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky
A fuselage section came down on streets in Rosebank, on the northern edge of the town.
Meanwhile, the fuel-laden wing section came down on the Sherwood area on the western edge of Lockerbie, adjoining the A74 road, now a motorway. As it came down it exploded in a fireball made worse by ruptured gas mains.
It was in this area, Sherwood Crescent, where 11 Lockerbie residents were killed. No trace was ever found of some of the victims, who were vaporised in the fireball.
Lockerbie’s Town Hall and its ice-rink were pressed into service as temporary mortuaries and within 24 hours of the disaster, a total of 1,000 police had been drafted in, along with 500 military helpers.
In the initial stages, 40 ambulances and 115 personnel attended at Lockerbie. They stood down shortly afterwards due to the minimal number of casualties, with all those involved in the tragedy either dead or having suffered minor injuries.
The bodies and wreckage had come down in two main flight corridors, one of which included the Kielder forest in Northumbria, the most densely-wooded part of the UK.
At the height the plane had been flying, winds were more than 100 knots. Some of the lighter pieces of wreckage were found miles away.
On the night of the crash, police made an immediate policy decision to treat the disaster as a criminal investigation.
Public confirmation of what had been suspected from the outset came on December 28, when investigators announced that traces of high explosive had been found and the plane had been brought down by a bomb.
A later fatal accident inquiry was to determine that the bomb was in a Toshiba radio-cassette player in a Samsonite suitcase which ‘probably’ joined the flight at Frankfurt in Germany.
Of the 259 passengers and crew – 150 men and 109 women – killed, 188 were Americans and 33 were British. The others came from 19 other countries including France, Germany, India, Sweden, and Japan.
The 11 people who were killed on the ground – four males and seven females – were all British.
Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of the atrocity. He was jailed for 27 years but died of prostate cancer aged 60 in 2012 after being released on compassionate grounds in 2009.
Earlier this year, a review of his conviction was announced. Some suspect he may have been made a scapegoat and that other Middle Eastern countries were involved in the terror attack.