On December 21, 1988, Pan Am flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board and 11 individuals on the ground. It was soon determined that a bomb had caused the disaster. The explosive had been constructed with the odorless Semtex and was hidden in a cassette player that was stored in a suitcase. The evidence indicated that the suitcase had been loaded onto a plane traveling from Malta to Frankfurt; there was no accompanying passenger. The luggage then was transferred to Pan Am flight 103, and after landing at Heathrow, it was moved to the ill-fated plane.
The investigation implicated two Libyan intelligence agents, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifa Fhimah. The attack was believed to be retaliation for a series of confrontations between the United States and Libya in the 1980s, notably the U.S. bombing campaign against Libya’s capital, Tripoli, in 1986. In 2001 Megrahi was convicted of the bombing, while Fhimah was acquitted. Two years later the Libyan government “accepted responsibility for the actions of its officials” and agreed to pay billions of dollars to the families of the victims. In 2022 Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud, the alleged bomb-maker, was taken into U.S. custody.