3. The Lockerbie Bombing of December 21st 1988 killed all 259 people on board Pan Am Flight 103
The town of Lockerbie, just over the border in Scotland, is a fairly unremarkable place where little of note ever happens. That all changed under tragic circumstances one night in December 1988, as locals prepared for the Christmas season. At around 7 pm, Pan Am Flight 103, traveling to New York from London carrying mainly US Citizens home for the holidays, was over Lockerbie when it exploded. A terrorist had hidden a time-bomb in a cassette player on board, which was so powerful that it spread the wreckage over an 850-mile radius. All 259 people on board were killed.
As for Lockerbie, 11 residents were also killed as 21 buildings were destroyed by the falling debris. Amazingly, it wasn’t until 2001 that anyone was convicted, in large part due to Colonel Gaddafi’s refusal to turn in the suspects identified in 1991, and the time it took for 15, 000 people to be interviewed and 180, 000 pieces of evidence to be analyzed. The guilty party was Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, a Libyan, who was given 20 years in a Scottish jail but released in 2009, to great public outcry, because he was suffering from terminal cancer.
