Lockerbie

The following programme contains distressing scenes.

That night...

we wondered why they were racing through from one field to another.

We thought, 'What has scared the sheep?'

We were very lucky there was no sheep killed,

with all the... Everything that came down... everything coming down.

This is the red suitcase.

That was quite the thing to see.

Well, there's the house.

That's how near it was. These things were all in front of the house, yeah.

That's a trolley, I think, a food trolley.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that was the door.

That we found, yeah.

We just thought,

'Just a few hours before,

'they'd all gone in that door, hadn't they?'

And here, it's lying amongst them.

Yeah.

Pan Am Flight 103 crashed into the Scottish village of Lockerbie.

270 lives lost.

It was Britain's worst ever air crash.

We have no knowledge of how this accident happened.

We're trying to find out.

It was an attack on America.

Largest crime scene in history.

200,000 pieces of evidence.

My daughter hadn't died in an accident -

she has been brutally murdered.

They killed our children. To be lied to for 30 years

I think the US Government had an agenda.

Reagan is the biggest terrorist in the world.

If it's up to our government,

we might not ever know the truth.

Nothing is what it seems in the Lockerbie story.

Come on. Come on.

Sit, there's a good boy.

You stay there.

You stay there, OK.

'Both my grannies came from the Isle of Skye.

'And Flora - my daughter Flora -

'was very fond of Skye, she used to come up here whenever she could.'

That's a picture of her...

'just behind you on the wall over there isn't it?

That is her attending the Skye Ball.

She was a very striking girl.

Very easy to talk to

and to get to know.

And she used to make her own dresses...

...and not because I pushed her.

But she finally decided to go into medicine.

And she was actually part way through her medical training.

She was just on the eve

of her 24th birthday that year, 1988.

She rang up to ask us if we minded

if she went over to America...

to meet her boyfriend over Christmas.

And of course, um,

not being total ogres, we said, 'Yes if that's what you want to do'.

Everything was booked up, except there were plenty of seats available

on a certain flight known as Pan Am 103...

...which is why we're talking now.

Before, you know, 1988,

no-one had really ever heard of Lockerbie.

It was dotted on the A74, on the way to Glasgow.

You might have had a stop-in at the chip shop for a bite to eat, maybe.

Life here was...

just... undramatic, you know?

The 21st of December 1988

will stay with me forever.

It was three months into my police career,

I was just about to turn 19.

And I happened to be the youngest recruit in Scotland at the time too.

Got into the car about... twenty to seven,

to be at a Christmas party just outside the town.

We were actually plucking turkeys for Christmas.

So, we had help, and we were all sitting round the table

having our supper, through in the kitchen.

It was a dark, - windy night, yeah. - It was.

I was only 17.

Basically, we were just sitting watching the television.

My father was away, getting a turkey for Christmas.

I think we were watching 'This is Your Life'.

Now, we're planning to give a Christmas surprise to the man

who, 40 years ago,

brought this loveable character to life.

And it was three minutes past seven.

I can always remember three minutes past seven that night.

And I'm here to say, Harry Corbett, 'This is Your Life'.

I heard this loud noise.

We heard, like, banging bang, bang, bang.

And the pheasants were all shouting.

So, we all jumped up, looked out the window.

There was like a great big mushroom ball of fire.

You could see the thing just over the hill,

that was just sort of coming out of Lockerbie.

There was glass.

Oh my God.

Unbelievable.

Everywhere.

Over.

Come on, Jack.

Over.

Over.

I thought I was witnessing some kind of chemical tanker crash

on the A74 ahead of me.

And then a sergeant emerged out of the smoke,

and he said, 'Colin, there's a hole in the road in Sherwood Crescent.

'You'd better go to the police station and sign on'.

Move back please folks, live electricity cable.

We thought it was a military aircraft,

because they were still practising in the dark, you see.

We just thought, 'Oh, my goodness, one of them boys have crashed.'

We seen the house lighting up.

Keith has gone to the door. 'Just shut it cos it's too frightening.'

Oh, my God, it was terrible.

And then sparks, and then the whole thing went down.

Oh, I didn't know what was happening.

Like, I just got a fright. Shaking, I was.

People were completely numb and confused.

Why was there a huge explosion at one end of the town,

and why was the other end of the town also affected?

It didn't initially make any sense.

After supper, we just set off down the hill.

Here's stuff lying on the side of the road.

And we had took one look, and we thought,

'This has been no military plane'.

We could tell, it must have been a passenger.

And you were guessing how many people maybe was on that plane.

And you would think,

'My goodness! How many hundreds of people are in mourning right now?'

Before we go,

we have an unconfirmed report from the Ministry of Defence

that a Boeing 747 airliner -

we know only that it's a civilian airliner -

has crashed in the Lockerbie area of Dumfriesshire.

We don't know what airline,

but the report makes it plain that it is a civilian airliner.

I was making a Christmas calendar,

to send out to members of the family.

And I was suddenly and abruptly called by my wife Jane,

because, on the television,

there was this message about a terrible disaster

happening in the borders between Scotland and England.

And Jane concluded immediately that...

Flora was on that plane.

Aircraft involved, a Pan Am 747.

The radio reported that a Pan American flight

had disappeared from radar.

Flight 103.

And I said to my mother,

'Oh that's the flight that John's gonna come home on tomorrow'.

And I said, you know, 'Those families...

'..they're never gonna be the same again'.

And, um...

...and so everybody bowed their head.

And we...

we just had our moment of silence,

and a bit of a prayer...

and, um, I didn't realise that, you know,

I was really praying for myself and...

and my family and... I never imagined that,

you know, um, this...

this was something that I would ever be...

a part of.

I was working for Radio Forth in Edinburgh.

Fortunately, I found someone in the radio station -

who comes from the area -

and was able to navigate me right into the middle of the town.

So, you were one of the first journalists on the ground?

Yeah. I would imagine so, yes.

The first thing you noticed was an overwhelming...

stink of aviation fuel filled the whole town.

It was such a bizarre scene, because it was so close to Christmas.

There was no electricity, obviously the lights in the houses were out.

But the light of the flames, you could...

quite clearly see Christmas trees and Christmas decorations.

It was really hard to comprehend...

exactly what had happened.

I mean, Imagine when I said,

'Oh the golf course is covered in bodies, apparently'.

You're kind of built in to dismiss that,

you'd think 'Oh that can't be true',

you know, 'it's obviously just small town exaggeration',

and, of course, it's exactly what... what had happened.

The golf course was covered in bodies.

There have been no survivors reported from the crashed aircraft.

And we're waiting for Dr Hill to give us an official 'stand down'.

He's not prepared to do so,

because they still have several helicopters flying around the area,

bringing in casualties.

But so far as I can make out,

these casualties are...

are corpses.

And I think we could quite safely say -

to those who have turned up voluntarily -

we probably won't require their services.

And thank you very much for coming out.

Very early on the morning, not long after dawn had broken...

...we flew out to Lockerbie.