Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Scotland

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Dec 21, 1988:

Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Scotland

On this day in 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York explodes in midair over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground. A bomb hidden inside an audio cassette player detonated in the cargo area when the plane was at an altitude of 31,000 feet. The disaster, which became the subject of Britain's largest criminal investigation, was believed to be an attack against the United States. One hundred eighty nine of the victims were American.

 

Islamic terrorists were accused of planting the bomb on the plane while it was at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany. Authorities suspected the attack was in retaliation for either the 1986 U.S. air strikes against Libya, in which leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's young daughter was killed along with dozens of other people, or a 1988 incident, in which the U.S. mistakenly shot down an Iran Air commercial flight over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people.

Sixteen days before the explosion over Lockerbie, the U.S. embassy in Helsinki, Finland, received a call warning that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/pan-am-flight-103-explodes-over-scotland

 

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How Pan Am Flight 103 Blew Apart

The destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 was animated by Till Nowak in October 2008 for the TV documentary "History - Das Lockerbie Attentat," a film by Jean-Christoph Caron, produced by German television ZDF.

http://www.realclearhistory.com/video/2013/12/21/how_pan_am_flight_103_blows_apart.html