Pan Am Flight 103: unhappy anniversary
Today is the 26th anniversary of the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard as well as 11 people on the ground. Until 9/11, it had the distinction of having the largest loss of American life of any terrorist attack.
The families of the victims still grieve; there was a memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the day, where there is a special memorial cairn:
The town of Lockerbie later shipped 270 blocks of locally quarried sandstone to America. Each block of the distinctive reddish stone represented a life lost in the disaster. The task of building these blocks into a memorial was undertaken by Frank Klein. A builder from New Jersey, whose daughter Patricia had been on PA103, Frank moved to Washington DC with some of his workers, and over several months lovingly erected the cairn that now stands in a secluded part of Section 1 in Arlington National Cemetery…[R]elatives gather every December at Arlington, where the names of their loved ones are engraved into the marble base of the Lockerbie Memorial Cairn – a unique and powerful tribute to such a devastating loss.
The town of Lockerbie has also dedicated part of its cemetery to the victims:
In a quiet corner of Lockerbie’s cemetery is a Garden of Remembrance. It is lovingly tended by local people, who have adopted those victims buried there, vowing always to visit the graves on behalf of their families.
Syracuse University, which lost 35 of its students—returning for Christmastime from a semester abroad—holds a memorial service as well.
There are others unlikely to forget:
Jaswant Basuta, a 47-year-old car mechanic, had checked in for Pan Am Flight 103, but arrived at the boarding gate too late. Having attended a family wedding in Belfast, he was returning to New York to start a new job. Friends and relatives from nearby Southall, came to see him off at the airport terminal, and bought him drinks in the upstairs bar. When “gate closing” flashed on the departure screen, Basuta hurried through security and passport control and sprinted to the departure gate, but the room was empty except for Pan Am ground staff who denied him access to the aircraft. He never made it to Pan Am 103 ”“ but his luggage did. Basuta was initially considered a suspect, as his checked baggage had been on the flight without him. This suspicion may have been heightened by Basuta having been a Sikh, and militant Sikhs having been implicated in the bombing of Air India Flight 182 three years previously. Basuta had also travelled from Belfast, a place notorious for terrorism linked to The Troubles. After questioning at a Heathrow police station, it was established he had no connection to the attack, and he was released without charge. Twenty years later, in an interview with the BBC, he talked about his narrow escape from death: “I should have been the 271st victim and I still feel terrible for all the other people who died.”
Al Megrahi, the only man ever convicted for the bombing of Flight 103, died in 2012 (if you do a search, you can find many posts about him on this blog). Qaddafi, of course, is likewise deceased.
The nation condemned the Westboro Baptist Church and its leader Fred Phelps – are the words and antics of Farrakhan acceptable?
As reported by Truth Revolt, “In a speech at a black college in Baltimore the Saturday before the Ferguson grand jury announcement, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan said that if the demands of the Ferguson protestors for the indictment of Officer Darren Wilson were not met, “we’ll tear this go!@amn country up!” In front of an enthusiastic crowd at Morgan State University, Farrakhan claimed that both the Quran and the Bible justified violence by the “law of retaliation” and accused the American judicial system of working only in the interest of whites. To the applause of his audience, the radical leader said “We going to die anyway. Let’s die for something.”
“White people, Farrakhan argued, will only begin to listen to minorities through violence against whites:
“As long as they [whites] kill us [blacks] and go to Wendy’s and have a burger and go to sleep, they’ll keep killing us. But when we die and they die, then soon we’re going to sit at a table and talk about it! We’re tired! We want some of this earth or we’ll tear this goddamn country up!” Rather than a peaceful response, Farrakhan encouraged the parents of teenagers to teach them to throw Molotov cocktails: “Teach your baby how to throw the bottle if they can. Fight!”
Please pardon, above posted on wrong thread.
Thanks for remembering this anniversary, no one else seems to have any recollection of it. I was living in Manhattan at the time and lost a dear friend on that flight who was returning from work in Italy. A very talented and gifted man died very young; a tragic loss as was the loss of everyone on that flight and on the ground. I’m very grateful to the people of Lockerbie for maintaining that memorial and remembering the innocents killed that horrible day.