Lockerbie | Largest Crime Scene In The World | FULL EPISODE | Mayday: Air Disaster

[Music] october the 26th 1988 near dusseldorf for weeks german police have been following a group of suspected terrorists around the ancient town of noice [Music] today they'll make their move [Music] [Music] yes in the trunk of their car police make an unusual discovery police raid apartments used by the two men they find a number of blank passports and a small arsenal of weapons when police closely examine the radio recovered from their car they find it's wired with explosives those devices use the combination of an improvised barometric device and a a timer a short delay timer all these devices were in fact supposed to go onto an aircraft a barometric timer is set off by changes in altitude it's triggered when it reaches a certain height since that guarantees a plane will be in the air when the bomb goes off it's a favorite device for those targeting passenger jets the two men arrested in germany worked for a well-known terrorist organization the popular front for the liberation of palestine leader of the pfl pgc ahmed gabriel made a speech in libya in 1986 and one of the things he said was that until there's peace in the middle east there would be no safety for anyone traveling on an american or an israeli airliner hafez is shipping weapons to syria and lebanon is a notorious bomb maker responsible for bringing down at least one passenger jet it's just a couple of months until the busy christmas travel season with the two men under arrest german police have made commercial aviation a little safer [Music] two months later pan am flight 103 is on its way from london to new york the jet has just taken off from heathrow airport there are 259 people on board most of the passengers are american charles mckee actually works for the u.s government khalid jafar lives in detroit and is returning home from a trip to lebanon and germany the first part of the trip to the united states takes the plane northwest up over scotland the so-called daventry departure is one of six preset routes the jets follow on their way out of heathrow lockerby is one of several small towns the plane will pass over tucked away in the scottish lowlands residents are barely aware that they live below a busy aerial highway pan am calls this 747 clipper maid of the seas as it levels off at 31 000 feet the crew gets in touch with air traffic control good evening scottish clipper 103. we are level at 3-1-0 103 you are identified captain james macquarie is 55 years old like many passengers on this pre-holiday flight he's heading home five miles below the people of lockerbie prepare for christmas michael gordon is chatting with a friend when a strange rumbling noise fills his house hang on there's something odd outside here the weather that night was a bit wild so it was a fairly strong westerly wind i could hear it hitting the window in front of me from my window i can see lockerbie because my house sits up in the hill and i heard this noise which was above the noise of the wind and the noise sounded like thunder and now now he's got loud and louder and i could hear the noise then got to the stage of being similar to a jet fighter and at that time we had a lot of military aircraft passing through the area however i saw dark objects stacked things falling from the sky against the lights of lockerbie i could see these black objects coming down and then from my right quite high in my right i could see a long thin black object which had a fire and upper surface coming in and it was making its way towards local when it hit there was it was horrendous explosion and i could hear the tiles and the roof of my house lifting hello hello when the explosion took place the telephone line stopped functioning lockerbie is burning enormous flames reach into the night sky michael gordon races to the neighborhood that is hardest hit the street was in fire the lawns were on fire and houses were on fire and it was difficult to go without finding my trousers burning and my shoes burning you had to jump about quite a bit because everything was on fire but i remember at that point finding an airline ticket and it was perfectly intact there's no damage by fire or fuel or contamination of any sort and the airline ticket said london heathrow to jfk somehow pan am flight 103 has fallen from the sky and smashed into lockerbie scotland [Music] in the daylight the full horror of the crash of pan am flight 103 is obvious several houses on the ground have simply vanished vaporized when the plane smashed into them an enormous crater is torn through the southern edge of the town [Music] fifteen hundred tons of rock and earth have been blasted out of the ground eleven people from lockerbie are dead along with all 259 people who were on board as far as i know i've lost my brother-in-law my sister-in-law and their house is just a 30-foot crater in the ruins of their homes they search for the bodies of the aircraft's passengers such a catastrophe so sudden so great a shock for a quiet town [Music] it looked like a scene out of hell this whole road was a place i didn't know what it was and then we rushed outside and just all this debris coming down air crash investigators have arrived in lockerbie within hours of the crash mick charles is the lead inspector for the british air accidents investigation branch the aaib one of the first sites we went to was the site of the crater that was uh still smelling very much of aviation fuel for a start and scattered all around where were bits of debris and in some cases human tissue as well charles quickly gathers his team to begin looking for clues it was all heaving it was happening there were loads of people and it was to some extent chaos you'll be organized into groups headed by an aaib inspector does anyone have any questions the sooner we start the better more than a thousand police officers and 600 members of the military pour into logarithm you always have this this sense of wanting to get to grips with what it is it was quite clear that whatever it was was colossal [Music] any debris that's found is put into clear plastic bags and left to be collected later dark bags are used to store human remains [Music] it's just days before christmas but the holiday spirit has been shattered at the start of the investigation what we were doing was finding out which bits of the aeroplane were where actually finding all the airplanes the sheer scale of the disaster is difficult to comprehend chris the raf have offered us a helicopter can we use it absolutely with so much wreckage being found investigators need to get a bird's-eye view and locate the largest fields of debris the maps of that area were a very short supply and we ran out of them very quickly so we had to use black and white photocopies initially investigators bring local police officer michael gordon with them to help in the search the intention was for me to be able to identify geographical landmarks and identify parts of the aircraft they soon get a better sense of their enormous task when we were in the helicopter we could see that the wreckage came out on in a cone shape emanating from lockerbie and the the cone shape got wider and wider the further from lockerbie the principal feature that i was looking for was to try to establish some pattern of of the wreckage which showed which would basically help me direct the ground investigators they're shocked by what they find pieces of the plane are scattered over an area larger than all of london more than 2 000 square kilometers it quickly becomes clear that pan am 103 was coming apart long before it hit the ground normally you're seeing a fairly contained accident site in lockerbie it was nothing like that because initially the police had identified half a dozen discrete sites a 747 is made up of more than six million parts in the mangled remains of the jet investigators need to find the one that will tell them what happened the plane's cockpit is eerie proof that pan am flight 103 broke apart in midair from the rest of the plane it's four kilometers east of the city when looking at the cockpit i was looking at the roof of it and the windows were intact the actual nose part had cracked open but it was as if it had been chopped off just after the cabin and you could walk around the back and look into the cabin section from the back inside the cockpit investigators note the positions of various switches and controls they find the autopilot is on and the oxygen masks are still stowed this is a fairly standard procedure which we would do in any such investigation the end result was that there was nothing at all untoward found in the cockpit it was everything was consistent with cruising flight soon investigators discover why the damage to lockerbie was so devastating the main wreckage which fell on the town of lockerbie was the wing which is basically both the left and right wing complete with a structure in the middle investigators estimate that the plane was loaded down with 90 000 kilograms of fuel 150 tons descending essentially vertically at up to about 500 knots speed and there's an awful lot of energy in that that's what created the crater [Music] to find the cause of the crash however investigators will have to look elsewhere [Music] they need to examine wreckage found south of lockerbie these pieces would have come off at the beginning of the disaster [Music] while the painstaking work of collecting evidence continues investigators comb through maintenance records those records raise concerns with the plane's age clipper made of the seas was the 15th 747 ever built by boeing this was one of the older boeing 747s it was built in 1970s so it was 18 years old and had got something like 75 000 flying hours perhaps some critical part of the plane had given way as it flew over lockerbie the two obvious possibilities were that it was a straightforward structural failure or it was possibly the result of sabotage mccharles tom thurman fbi good to meet you tom i was expecting you while the investigators are searching for possible answers in the history of the plane the second possibility sabotage is also being pursued we were there to provide technical expertise to the scottish investigators into explosives and explosive damage and that the telltale sign that it could be a bomb [Music] just three and a half years before lockerbie a bomb had brought down an air india jet just off the irish coast in that case the plane and vital clues sunk deep to the bottom of the sea but the wreckage of the pan am flight litters the scottish lowlands if it was a bomb there's a chance that important evidence can be found what kind of logistical effort is it going to take to find everything and i mean everything and bring it back to a location to be able to look at it and come to some conclusion with the fragments that we found on the ground we were picking those up we were looking for blast damage on these pieces of metal until we found something that said it was a bomb physical evidence it was an accident we were very mindful of the fact that there was plenty of reports in the media about it being a terrorist act it's a question of what evidence you find and and which direction to take the investigation in the first 24 hours four separate groups have claimed responsibility for bombing the jets [Music] dick marquis is an expert on international terrorism working for the american fbi a number of organizations either claim credit for or were given credit including groups from iran and the palestinian groups and one irish group also claimed responsibility for it six months earlier the u.s navy shot down an iranian passenger jet 290 people were killed the american government claims it was an accident but iran has vowed revenge other threats had been made in the weeks before the crash the american embassy in helsinki received an anonymous warning that a bomb would soon be put on a pan am flight leaving from frankfurt officials eventually discounted the threat but a notice was posted in american embassies many of the passengers who boarded flight 103 had come from frankfurt on a connecting flight right excellent work everyone then on christmas eve just three days after the crash of the plane the investigation gets an enormous break everyone clear on what they need to do this evening terrific tom can i see you absolutely yeah you'd like to put your gloves on i think for this mick charles had a bag and had a piece of metal in the bag what is it we think it's a piece of luggage rail it helps guide the cargo containers into place inspectors in the field discovered items which they recognized as being not part of a normal failure sequence that you would expect if it had been a structural failure nick this has been very near an explosion that's what we thought as well small marks have been made on the metal craters that are the telltale signs of a bomb the hot gases of the combustion process of the explosion hits a piece of particular metal and it puts pits in it like you would take a blow torch take a blow torch and you have a piece of metal and you just barely touch the piece of metal it'll make a little hole down into the middle it's the first piece of wreckage from outside the town of lockerbie to show any signs of being damaged by fire where did you find it i'll take you out in the morning the scottish countryside is about to become the largest crime scene in the world it's christmas day 1988 but in lockerbie scotland people are still reeling from a devastating plane crash [Music] christmas is just going to be remembered for all the long reasons for air crash investigators december the 25th is treated like any other day at work that was in my mind the most distinguishing characteristic of lockerbie and although so it was over christmas you just you just stay there and you do what you have to do investigators converge on a farmer's field outside of the town over here keep yelling we can't see you [Music] the weather had turned horrible foggy kind of misting rain you couldn't see 10 feet from it and there was debris literally all over the place another piece of the baggage compartment rail has been found it looks like the piece that you showed me last night about 20 inches is just gone and lo and behold that was the other piece of the skid rail that was literally sticking in the ground we made some photographs you know it was like it was a christmas present that we could go out there to this farm and find the other piece of metal that had been blown off now we were not fascinated we were pumped piece also has pits and craters in it indications that it was close to an explosion the pieces of wreckage are part of the southern debris field and near the beginning of it the placement suggests they were some of the first parts to break off the plane we were very suspicious that it was a bomb which had caused this destruction but we were not prepared to say anything until we'd had those details confirmed by the forensic experts a british forensics lab has made the critical link traces of two chemicals used to make plastic explosive are found on the debris recovered near lockerbie on december the 28th just seven days after the crash investigators have their proof and announce it to the world it has been established the two parts of the metal luggage pallets framework show conclusive evidence of a detonating high explosive the crash of pan am flight 103 is now officially a crime our mandate uh with regard to locker b was find out who did it prove it because we what we wanted to do is bring someone to justice and make them answer for killing 270 people with terrorism now the official cause rumors start to fly speculation eventually focuses on two passengers charles mckee works for the u.s department of defense charles mcgee was returning from the middle east where he was working trying to free hostages that had been taken in the middle east during the mid 1980s the hostages mckee was trying to release were being held in lebanon in 1988 a civil war was tearing that country apart americans were seen as useful bargaining chips there was speculation in the media that charles mckee may have been targeted by terrorists because of the work he was doing mckee isn't the only passenger who captures the attention of the media khali jafar was 20 years old and was returning home to the u.s after a trip to lebanon and germany perhaps a bomb was carried on board an aircraft by someone who may have had a middle eastern sounding name jafar was examined as a potential suspect the story makes it as far as the u.s congress but no proof can be found that jafar was involved or that mckee was the intended target we looked at every single passenger on the plane to see if in fact someone could have given them a bomb the evidence proved that not to be the case in lockerbie investigators from the aaib continue to sort through the tons of tangled metal we could i suppose in theory have just stopped but we thought we know it's a bomb we have all of the wreckage over land it's an ideal opportunity to recover it all and to understand it properly we knew it was a small bomb but we didn't understand the explosive processes investigators are particularly interested in the hull of the aircraft they move pieces of it to a military hangar just outside of town [Music] it was a five-acre shed in which was long enough that we could plan to lay the fuselage out as opened up like a clam shell using the bottom center line of the aircraft as our sort of core line the fuselage of an airplane is bolted to a series of frames and each frame is numbered based on how far it is from the front of the aircraft before we laid out the wreckage two-dimensionally we put lines and tapes on on the floor to give us a grid and is this grid related to the geometry of the aeroplane they begin to reassemble it like an enormous jigsaw puzzle a lot of the structure bears characteristic shapes that you can say immediately this looks like a door frame a lot of stuff it has unique part numbers which can help you identify small and fairly what you would call unidentifiable bits as the work continues more pieces of the plane are found that show telltale blast damage all right the location is eight one seven two zero four when they gather the pieces that are near the front of the plane investigators make a chilling discovery this is where the bomb had started ripping the plane apart it became apparent that there was an area of the aircraft which in which the damage was really quite different from the rest the fuselage in this section isn't torn but blasted to pieces fuselage structure in the area of the explosion was blackened and sooted the fractures were very rapid and jagged unlike normal tearing fractures of of skin frame 700 runs right round here not only do investigators now know it was a bomb they know where it blasted through the fuselage of the plane just outside of the forward luggage compartment peter clayton is responsible for reassembling the cargo containers that were directly behind the shutter zone the main goal i had was to identify the baggage container that contained the device we had maybe 20 baggish containers of a similar construction so we like it's like having 20 jigsaw puzzles all mixed up the investigators concentrate on the cargo containers that were found in the southern debris field wreckage that was ejected shortly after the explosion we concluded there were only two on the aircraft one made of aluminium one made of fiberglass and they had been adjacent to each other on the aircraft and they were the only two that exhibited evidence of an improvised explosive device having detonated the metal container ave 4041 is of particular interest it was resting directly behind frame 700 where the blast damage is the worst [Music] the damage caused to the metal container is quite severe the damage to the adjacent fiberglass container i think you might call it collateral damage investigators create a simple framework and attach the pieces of the real cargo container to it [Music] as they do it becomes clear ave 4041 carried the bomb that brought the plane down closely examining damage to the floor and the side of the container investigators are also able to pinpoint the height of the bomb where it was in the container when it exploded what that said to me was that the device was probably in a suitcase and that suitcase was probably not on the floor of the container it looked like it was one level up according to luggage records it means that the bag containing the bomb had come from a connecting flight while investigators are assembling a piece of the metal container they discover a fragment of wreckage that doesn't belong well looking at it i saw an little piece of debris trapped in one of the folds so gently flexing this apart it fell out when i looked at it i could see it was a fragment of a printed circuit board an electronic circuit board can you bring me a camera and an evidence bag please let's get this still out i didn't know what it was the bottom part of the airplane really or what it could have been suddenly shaver for a while eventually forensic experts in britain determined that the circuit board was a piece of a specific brand of radio [Music] news of the discovery makes its way to washington it reaches tom thurman who's returned to his office there and lo and behold an identification was made into a toshiba sf 16 radio and ironically enough the the name on the side of that radio just as a brand name i guess was called a bomb beat radio the radio cassette player had hidden the bomb it's very similar to the one that was recovered by german police when they cracked the palestinian terrorist cell two months before the bombing had german police somehow missed something had a bomb made here been used on the pan am flight when the bombing happened one of the initial suspects certainly was the pfl pgc cell in germany the intelligence told us that the pfl pgc was probably responsible for this 49 passengers who eventually boarded the pan am flight started their journey in the german city of frankfurt their bags were placed onto flight 103 in london but the airline did not ensure the passengers who checked in the bags actually got onto the plane [Music] perhaps a bomb made in germany had slipped through the cracks at heathrow while the terrorists walked away we had to then if that was the case prove it as the investigation continues there's a puzzling discovery while made by the same company the cassette player used in the lockerbie bombing is slightly different from the one that was seized in germany both were contained in toshiba radios but one was a one speaker model and the one that blew up the lockerbie plane was a two speaker more updated model radio the difference in the model of radio being used raises doubts perhaps the terrorists in germany are not responsible you can look at the way the a device is put together and say hey i know who put this together because i've seen this before and this is the way that this bomb builder puts a bomb together to call it a bomber signature law enforcement officials need more clues to figure out who had built the bomb [Music] perhaps the suitcase it was packed in can provide those clues studying small pieces of wreckage british forensic experts find that the suitcase was a hard-sided samsonite four thousand samsonite made only a few thousand of these suitcases and sold all of them in the middle east [Music] several pieces of clothing have also been identified that were very close to the explosion likely in the suitcase that concealed the bomb most of these clothes were made by a single manufacturer and were only sold on the tiny island of malta so malta became the focus of the investigation because of the the manufacture and eventually distribution of the some of the clothing that was found at lockerbie investigators find the shop in malta where the clothes were sold the owner gives them another clue [Music] the key thing that he told us was the person had a libyan accent something we didn't really have evidence yet that tied libya to the bombing it was just two weeks before the attack on the pan am flight in 1988 libya was reeling from a number of confrontations with the american military economic sanctions had been imposed the country was isolated and its leader muammar qaddafi aggressively anti-american perhaps the bombing of the pan am flight was an attack by libya against the united states pouring through baggage records for the pan am flight police discover one piece of luggage that had been carried from malta to frankfurt earlier that day bag number b8849 had then been sent through to britain's heathrow airport once there it was placed on the second level of cargo container ave-4041 [Music] it was the samsonite case investigators now know carried the bomb more than a year after the crash a new discovery in lockerbie helped simplify the confusing series of clues forensic experts discover another circuit board from among the clothes that came from malta it doesn't come from that circuit board that was in the sf16 radio and this this circuit board is half the size of your thumbnail a photo of the circuit board is sent to tom thurman he believes it could be a piece of the timer from the bomb i spent months literally looking through all of the files of the fbi on other examinations that we had conducted over many many many years the fbi has photos of timers used to detonate bombs around the world but thurman can't find any that match the piece found at lockerbie next after a period i just i ran out of leads and at that point um said okay now we need to go outside the physical fbi laboratory thurman eventually takes the photo of the circuit to the central intelligence agency i called a contact of mine and said i need to bring something over for you to look at sifting through reports on various bombings thurman finds a match wait a second that could be the same do you have this timer when thurman closely examines the timer captured by the cia he's stunned within a few minutes literally i started getting cold chills and right now as i talk about it cold chills start on me because i can still see that moment so vividly in my mind that i'm looking at that circuit track that just like what i'm seeing in the photograph this is what we're looking for the timer the cia has was seized in africa a few years earlier two libyan men were trying to get it and several pounds of explosives past airport security it's identical to the timer used to bring down flight 103 and wouldn't be set off by changes in pressure like the barometric switch discovered in germany this device was set to go off at a certain time not at a given altitude this is the time this is a long delay timer that brought down that aircraft but now we want to know okay where'd this come from the lockerbie bomb used a different timer and a different radio than the bomb found in germany someone else was behind the destruction of the jet this was not made in somebody's home laboratory this was a extremely professionally made timer while the criminal investigation becomes murkier the accident investigation is becoming increasingly clear [Music] the investigation eventually moves from scotland to farnborough england well known for its aeronautics industry the town is home to the aaib several months after the crash of pan am flight 103 investigators launch a massive endeavor they begin to rebuild a 20-meter section of the fuselage from the ruined jet they hope that it would give them information their two-dimensional reconstruction couldn't they can see that the explosion tore a one and a half by five meter hole in the side of the plane chris prodero is a senior inspector of air accidents at the aaib what was very difficult to understand was the fact that this area of direct damage was effectively a pinprick in relation to the the size of the aircraft as a whole and it was very difficult to understand how this pinprick of damage had resulted in such a comprehensive destruction of the of the aircraft the bomb that brought the plane down had less than half a kilogram of explosive yet its destructive power was immense investigators want to learn more about how shock waves behave inside a jet it's rather like a freeze frame on a video footage if you can capture that point as the thing is coming apart it tells you a great deal about the way it's coming apart what they discover is that the initial blast wave wasn't the only one to damage the plane a large section of the ceiling of the aircraft has been pushed up with so much force that the rivets connecting it to the plane's frame popped it wasn't torn apart but blasted by a shock wave the other features that the 3d reconstruction allowed us to identify were areas of remote pressure damage on the crown skin and and other areas where explosive shock had been channeled through the internal spaces in the aircraft the inside of a jet acts like an echo chamber bouncing the shock waves of the bomb around they gather strength until they encounter a weak spot in the skin when they do they blast through the work in farnborough is powerful proof of how destructive even a small bomb can be and how vital it is to track the bombers down almost two years after the lockerbie disaster the criminal trail of evidence brings investigators to zurich the timer that detonated the bomb is traced to a swiss company called nebo one of the owners of the company admits to building it [Music] the timer was given to the libyan government total of 20 of them were made all delivered to libyan officials early in the investigation focus was directed at the palestinian terrorist group in germany now there's growing proof that they had nothing to do with the downing of flight 103 there were any number of suspects and it wasn't until we kept putting everything in one pile in the libya in the pile kept stacking up and it spelled libya criminal investigators have linked the timer that detonated the bomb to libya they know that a libyan bought the clothes that were in the suitcase and they know that libya has a recent history of military confrontation with america all they need now is the bomber himself in 1999 they finally have him at the time of the disaster abdel was an intelligence officer for the libyan government he's arrested and charged he was a high-ranking libyan official he certainly could have access to whatever he wanted our investigation determined that mcgrache also had a front company at mebo he had been there many times he certainly knew each other when you start to see all the connections and these things just start fitting together it made it easier to accept our evidence in 2001 scottish judges sentenced him to life for the murder of 270 people two years later the government of libya officially accepts responsibility for the bombing and pays 2.7 billion dollars to the families involved anger is also aimed at pan am for the role it played in the disaster a scottish inquiry points a finger at the company the passenger who checked the bomb onto flight 103 did not get on board it's a fact that pan am could have discovered had it been following proper procedures one of the things we discovered when we looked into the bombing of panel flight 103 was that there were several bags on that plane that did not correspond to passengers one of the changes that came about as a result of the air india bombing was that airlines were forced to make sure no bag was put on a plane without a passenger accompanying it called passenger baggage reconciliation without proper notification pan am had stopped matching passengers and baggage at heathrow airport so that rule that said that all passengers and luggage have to be matched was not followed the company was eventually found guilty of willful misconduct after the crash and the court ruling pan am declared bankruptcy [Music] 20 years after the bombing of pan am flight 103 its shattered fuselage still stands in farnborough england those pieces may soon be used to train investigators here and around the world a critical aid in case terrorists strike again [Music] the the enduring feeling i have as a result of lockerbie is the tremendous level of cooperation we had from all the agencies and considering that there were about two and a half thousand people with the military the police and so on involved in this i think that's uh that's a great tribute lockerbie was a rare occasion that we felt honored to be a part of to help make to help make this happen we played small roles but everybody played small roles to make big contributions to an overall success in the town of lockerbie there's little evidence today of the horror that exploded from the sky 20 years ago in a small church near where the dying plane's cockpit landed is a stark reminder of the toll of terror and the importance of bringing the guilty to justice [Music] you

Channel: Mayday: Air Disaster

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Id: _PqPKjWabio

Length: 48min 50sec (2930 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 23 2021