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The Bombing of Pan Am 103: Lockerbie Disaster: The Town That Cleaned Up After the Sky Fell
Paperback
Biographies GeneralGeneral World HistoryTrue Crime
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Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.38 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
On 21 December 1988, a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of the Seas lifted off from Heathrow at 18:25, bound for New York. Thirty-eight minutes later a bomb the size of a paperback tore it open at thirty-one thousand feet. Forty-nine and a half seconds after that, the wings came down on a residential street in a Scottish market town of three and a half thousand people, carrying a hundred tonnes of burning fuel. Two hundred and seventy people died. Eleven of them were sitting in their own front rooms.
The world remembers a photograph of a nose cone in a field. It has forgotten almost everything else. It has forgotten the eight hundred and forty-five square miles of debris, the largest crime scene in British history, walked in lines by farmers and shepherds and boys of nineteen who had never seen a dead body. It has forgotten the town hall that became a mortuary, and the ice rink that became one after that. And it has almost entirely forgotten the women who spent more than a year washing, ironing and folding fourteen thousand garments belonging to strangers, so that mothers in New Jersey and fathers in Sussex could hold something their children had touched.
This book gives them back their place at the centre of the story. It follows the aircraft from Gate K-14 to the crater at Sherwood Crescent. It walks the debris field with the smallest police force in Britain as it conducts the largest murder inquiry Scotland has ever known. It follows the evidence to a Palestinian cell in West Germany, to a shopkeeper's memory of a rainy evening in Malta, to a fragment of circuit board the size of a fingernail, to a Scottish courtroom improvised in a Dutch field, and then into the long unravelling that followed, where an independent commission found that no reasonable court could have reached the verdict a court reached.
Nothing here is invented. No dialogue is put into the mouths of the dead. Where the record is contested, you are shown the competing versions and left to weigh them, because the deeper you go into this case, the clearer it becomes that a case can be closed and unresolved at the same time.
And it is not over. As you read this, a seventy-four-year-old Libyan sits in a federal courtroom in Washington while a judge decides whether his confession was beaten out of him in a Libyan cell. Sections of the fuselage that lay in a Scottish field have been crated and flown across the Atlantic. The families are in the gallery again, waiting again, thirty-eight years on.
If you have ever wondered what actually happens to ordinary people when history falls on them without warning, and what they do next, this is the account you have been waiting for.
Turn the first page. Then decide who deserves to be remembered.
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