Lockerbie by Douglas Boyd

Author:Douglas Boyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

As events would later prove, it was a pity that Dr Swire and Señora Larracochea had no official role in the investigation. They were on the right track, connecting the IED on board with the Syrian-based PFLP-GC and Iran, but the investigative line being currently followed was that the suitcase containing ‘the said explosive device’ must have arrived at Frankfurt on a flight of an airline other than Pan American and so was interlined to Pan Am there, being loaded onto Flight 103A without being identified as an unaccompanied bag either on the flight from Frankfurt to Heathrow or the flight from Heathrow. Allowed to sit with the lawyers at the FAI as an ‘official representative’ of the victims, Larracoechea had asked Amarjit Sidhu whether he was aware of at least three security breaches at Heathrow after the crash, but the question was disallowed by Sherrif Mowat, saying he was not concerned with events after the disaster, but only with what led up to it. She also asked Sidhu if he recognised staff entitled to be in the interline shed by badges or their uniforms. He replied that this was the job of airport security personnel, but other staff on duty would have known if a stranger was in the shed, and none had been noticed on 21 December. Loader-driver Terence Crabtree agreed that he had closed baggage container AVE4041 when it was full and driven it to Clipper Maid of the Seas for loading.

Señora Larracoechea had spent much time studying legal aspects of the flight and the crash. Her questioning of Michael Sullivan, Pan Am’s Director of Flight Services at Heathrow, revealed a minor tragedy within the greater one. Since the Boeing 747 was only two-thirds full, the requisite cabin crew numbered twelve, but thirteen stewards and stewardesses were listed among the fatalities. Why was this, she wanted to know. It appeared that the unlucky thirteenth person had requested unofficially to travel on that flight and been allowed by the purser to join the scheduled crew. Asked whether he knew who was the thirteenth person, Sullivan replied that he thought so but was not going to give a name.

As to why she and her bereaved brother-in-law were at the FAI, Larracoechea replied that they wanted to raise issues in a personal way – not how lawyers would have done it. For example, what about the advance warnings to US diplomats, not to travel on that flight? The public was not warned, nor was the crew. She maintained that responsibility for the death of her sister, known as Nieves or Snow to other Pan Am colleagues, and the 269 other victims lay not just with the bombers but also with what she called ‘the passive accomplices’ in the US State Department, the counter-intelligence agencies and Pan Am management who had, for whatever reasons, blocked dissemination of the warning. Mowat’s note of her submission ended:

Finally, [Ms Larracoechea] submitted that the Inquiry had been too limited in its consideration of [a] The

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