Lockerbie: A Search for Justice on Sky – a meticulous and honourable dramatisation of the 1988 atrocity and what happened next
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On 21 December 1988 a bomb exploded on Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 on the ground. This meticulous, methodical five-part drama from Sky details what has and hasn’t happened in the 36 years since, through the perspective and the research of the father of one of the victims – Dr Jim Swire, played with careworn decency by Colin Firth.
Like last year’s fact-based hit Mr Bates vs the Post Office, the story pits a single man against injustice and bureaucracy, but here there is no resolution. Though Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of 270 counts of murder in a special court in the Netherlands in 2001 it’s still not conclusively known whether Libya, Syria, Iran or some loose terrorist alliance planted the bomb.
Successive British governments have censored documents and refused an inquiry. The level of knowledge and expedient pragmatism among oil-hungry Western states is impossible to fathom. Pan Am 103 was flying from Frankfurt to Detroit via London and New York and many US embassy staff allegedly cancelled bookings on it at late notice – enabling others, like Swire’s daughter Flora, to nab a seat.
Swire himself is a complicated character, whose fight for justice by any means available – smuggling a fake bomb onto another flight to make a point, meeting with Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi – alienated other bereaved families. Having campaigned to bring al-Megrahi to trial he later became convinced of his innocence, befriended him and still hopes to clear his name (al-Megrahi died of prostate cancer in Libya in 2012).
