News Bulletin from 22nd December 1988

Day broke slowly over Lockerbie. Over its shadowed ruins, over the cockpit of Pan Am’s Maid of the Seas, nose down in the soft earth. Over her dead passengers brought in on stretchers from miles around. Over the helicopters who came for survivors, left with the dead.

From them you could see what happens when a plane eight stories high, a football pitch wide, falls from 30,000 feet. The huge craters, scarred into the town’s southern suburb by the fuselage of the plane hitting the streets like a ballistic missile. The aircraft came out of the sky trailing flames, scattering wreckage, fuel, and passengers.