Guardian Archive: the Lockerbie Bombing December 21 1988

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From the archive, December 21 1988: On this day a Pan Am flight en route from London to New York crashed over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland. This is how the Guardian reported the events.

One view from a desolate hillside

Leader
Friday December 23, 1988
The Guardian

Two days before Christmas, two tides flow strongly. One - the greater tide - is the tide of peace. More nagging, bloody conflicts have been settled in 1988 than in any year since the end of the Second World War. There are forces for good abroad in the world as seldom before. There is also a tide of evil, a force of destruction. By just one of those ironies which afflict the human condition, peace came to Namibia yesterday. Meanwhile, on a Scottish hillside, the body of the Swedish UN Commissioner for Namibia was one amongst hundreds strewn across square miles of debris: a victim - supposition, but strongly based - of a random terrorist bomb which blown a 747 to bits at 31,000 feet. No-one could quite tell who was responsible. In a sick world, sick, anonymous voices called newspapers to claim conflicting responsibility. I am the Devil .. No, I am the Devil. There are two responses to that second, malevolent tide. One (valid, necessary) is to go about business as normal. To search the houses of Sherwood Crescent, Lockerbie , for the unknown corpses. To make statements of horror and compassion. To sift the hills for clues. To praise the efficiency of those who rushed to the rescue. And, of course, to ask questions. Was it structural failure in an elderly Jumbo? Or was the US Moscow embassy's relaxed alert, warning of a December bomb attack on a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt, more than coincidence? If so, why did routine security allow a bomb aboard? But if so, why was there a warning at all? What did it gain?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1378098,00.html

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1. The closing paragraph to that article was as follows:

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"We have not found The Answer to terrorism. There is no answer. Determined attackers will always find a way. But we have begun to find an answer. We have begun, this year, to dowse the brushfires of regional conflict. We have begun, East and West, to acknowledge a common interest in stability, and peace. We have begun to address some of the fault lines of global politics. That is progress. Lockerbie returns us swiftly to a previous world of bestiality. But, one disaster upon another, it also awakens a common response of human feeling and human brotherhood. That is progress, too."

Words of optimism and hope. In the sixteen years that followed the Lockerie terrorist event just what progress has been made by our leaders? A world of endless terror and retaliation slipping more quickly and deliberately to the basest of human instincts. The most powerful country, the United States, divided down the middle politically, but leaning toward swift, immediate and indiscriminate violent retaliation against those it assesses as the enemy. God help us all!

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2. On the morning of 9/11 the BBC ran a story saying new evidence

showed the Pan Am Lockerbie plane bomb may have been loaded at Heathrow Airport and not Frankfurt. This was sourced to a previously undiscolsed break in in the luggage section used by Pan Am and had not been reported to the CIA investigators whose work led to the jailing of a Libyan.

The story was developing nicely when suddenly the WTC horror struck.

The Pan Am story was never broadcast again....