Lockerbie true story: What happened to Jim Swire?

Swire’s 23-year-old daughter Flora had only booked a seat on the transatlantic Pan Am Flight 103 the day before its ill-fated journey from London’s Heathrow Airport to New York’s JFK, having planned to spend the holidays with her American boyfriend.

Here’s a look at how the former GP subsequently threw himself into investigating what’s still the deadliest terror attack in UK history.

Lockerbie true story

The campaign group

Less than four months after 243 passengers, 16 crew members and 11 residents in the small Scottish town of Lockerbie lost their lives in the tragedy, the UK Families Flight 103 group was set up to both support those most affected and campaign for an independent inquiry. And Swire soon became their most high-profile, and controversial, activist.

Indeed, in an attempt to expose the slow reaction from airline security, Swire took an interconnecting flight from London to Boston in May 1990... with a fake bomb. Constructed from a radio cassette player and, in a novel substitute for Semtex, marzipan, the device somehow made it on board without any problem, validating concerns that authorities had learned little from the disaster.

"You simply cannot imagine how depressing it was flying over the Atlantic knowing that there could easily be a bomb in the cargo hold below," Swire later remarked. Although several members of the group were in favour of the stunt, which only became public knowledge six weeks on, others felt that it had crossed a line.

The lobbying

Swire further alienated many support group members with his response to the two Libyan men accused of the atrocity, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah.

In 1998, he and Edinburgh University’s Professor Robert Black lobbied for the pair to be prosecuted on neutral territory but under Scottish law; Libya, whose laws didn’t allow for extradition, had previously had an offer rejected by the UK and US to prosecute them on home soil.

He also went on to meet with several world leaders including Tony Blair and Colonel Gaddafi on the campaign trail. Three years later, Megrahi and Fhimah finally stood trial at a Scottish court in the Netherlands, Camp Zeist, in which the former was convicted and the latter acquitted. Swire, who’d been in attendance throughout, fainted at the verdict. But not for the reasons you might have expected.

The appeal

Indeed, Swire didn’t believe that Megrahi was responsible for the bombing. In 2005, the pair met face-to-face for the first time to discuss strategies for an appeal: the former later offered to stump up £500,000 for any lawyers willing to take on the case.

Two years later, a review from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found that the Libyan may have been subject to a miscarriage of justice and granted him an appeal.

Swire’s defence of Megrahi was met with fierce criticism, with several families of American victims revealing that they felt betrayed.

Undeterred, however, Swire went on to launch Justice for Megrahi, a campaign designed to allow the prisoner – now suffering from terminal prostate cancer – to head back to Libya while awaiting appeal.

In 2009, the Scottish justice secretary Kenny MacAskill granted Megrahi a compassionate release on the proviso that his conviction remained.

Swire, who’d voiced his disillusion over the deal, later went to visit the Libyan in Tripoli shortly before his death in 2012. "I am going to a place where I hope soon to see Flora," Megrahi said during their meeting. "I will tell her that her father is my friend."

The alternate theory

So, who did Swire believe was responsible if Megrahi’s conviction really was as unjust as he’d claimed? Well, in his 2021 book, The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father's Search For Justice, he argued that the true guilty party was a Jordanian double agent whose value to the CIA left him untouchable.

"It's my belief that the US and British governments collaborated to pin the blame for Lockerbie on Libya, and that the two countries worked together to ensure any evidence undermining the case against al-Megrahi would never see the light of day."

What happened to Jim Swire?

Now aged 88, Swire lives in the Cotswolds with his wife, and Flora’s mother, Jane.

And, according to Firth, who met up with the couple before filming, he’s still as sharp as a button. "This vigilance, this readiness to respond to new ideas, that was very apparent in that first meeting," the actor told a Q&A in which he also praised Swire’s "alertness and intellectual agility".

And Swire is delighted that his story is now being told on such a wide scale, telling Sky, "It is an extraordinary development in a campaign which, up until now, had been seeming that it would die away...

"You can see the juxtaposition there between what, for us, is still a very simple family affair: we want to know who murdered our eldest daughter, as simple as that."

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is coming to Sky Atlantic and NOW on Thursday 2nd January 2025 – find out more about how to sign up for Sky TV.

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