Details Regarding Pan Am Flight 103 Air Crash Investigation

Pan Am flight 103 air crash investigation sort to establish the cause of the disaster that led to the death of 259 passengers on board and 11 people on the ground. The plane was headed to New York from London and had only been airborne for 38 minutes. The scene of this disaster was in Scotland in a small town called Lockerbie.

The plane was flying at 31,000 feet in the sky when the bomb exploded. The culprits were said to be Libyan terrorists who had hidden the bomb in a suitcase at the luggage compartment. It took a detailed assembly of all the pieces of the plane recovered on site to come to this conclusion. They were gathered in a warehouse when it became apparent that this was an act of terror. This caused a media flood to the area.

Investigations took three years before two Libyans were implicated. They were considered the men behind the attack. Those tried were Mohamed Abdel Baset and Al-Amin Khalifa. Khalifa would later be released for lack of evidence implicating him while Al-Amin faced life in prison. Libya paid 2.7 million dollars in damages after she accepted responsibility for the terrorist act.

Any plane involved in a crash has its case taken over by Air Accident Investigation Branch. This branch investigates any civil accident crash or air disaster in UK. Investigations began on the night of the crash. Investigators had to combine numerous pieces of the aircraft that were scattered over a 2000 square kilometers area. A total of 4 million pieces were collected and registered in computers.

Investigations took a criminal turn when it emerged that a bomb might have been planted on the luggage section. Details gathered from the flight schedule revealed that the luggage must have been brought in at Frankfurt. The chemicals that were recovered from the scene included PETN and RDX which are associated with Semtex explosion. A multi-disciplinary team of FBI, local police and Scotland Yard was assembled.

America got into the investigations because 189 of the 270 passengers who died were Americans. This represented the highest mass murder by then and was only overtaken by 9/11. It took a total of 180,000 pieces of evidence, 35,000 photos of the scene and related areas and interviews of 15,000 people to generate the implicating report. Libya was faced with UN sanctions before it accepted responsibility and paid about 2.7 million dollars. The investigations covered 20 countries.

The budget for the overall trial was 60 million dollars which was a record in UK history. A total of 230 witnesses were called in a trial that took 89 days of evidence presentation and saw the recording of 10,000 pages of transcript. There is a theory that the real culprits were never caught. The bomb, according to the sources, was planted under the stewardship of Iran by Palestine citizens. The decision to implicate Libya was political and could not give the truth.

Iran was drawn into the picture since it was believed to be retaliating the death of 290 of her citizens in the Persian Gulf. Political machination has complicated investigations. This has made it difficult to know the truth about what transpired during that night.

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