Lockerbie images 'still haunt me'

Many remembered those who had lost their lives in the tragedy through books of condolence

By Atholl Duncan
BBC Scotland's head of news

Just a few minutes after 7pm on Wednesday, December 21, 1988, I opened a bottle of beer.

I'd just arrived at the BBC Glasgow newsroom party, but I had had just one sip before a colleague burst in to say that a plane had crashed at Lockerbie.

By 9.30pm I was shuffling silently in the town's Sherwood Crescent, with my reporting colleague, Ken Bryson, and our camera crew.

Firemen were standing bewildered, gently dousing the flames in a massive crater.

This was where the wings, containing nearly 1,000 tons of fuel, had crashed to earth.

All around, the neat little houses had been turned to black ash from an explosion that measured 1.6 on the Richter Scale.

In the days to come, helicopters buzzed overhead like a Vietnam war movie, as bodies were recovered from the hills and farmland around

Atholl Duncan
Then BBC journalist, now head of news BBC Scotland

Eleven people who lived there were dead.

We sat on a crash barrier on the central reservation of the A74, but much of the south bound carriageway was gone.

A lorry driver approached us - still in shock - carrying a budgie in its cage. He'd seen the fireball and pulled over.

Minutes later the cage had fallen at his feet with the bird still twittering inside - the only living thing left from the homes that had turned to dust.

In the next few hours and days, many images still haunt me;

in one garden, a row of seats from the plane, the passengers, who had been sleeping, held in by seatbelts
at Tundergarth Church, my first sight of the nose section of the plane lying in a field picked out by makeshift lights
and the pile of floral tributes outside the town hall. One simply said "To the little girl in the red dress, who made my journey from Frankfurt to London such fun. You did not deserve this"

In the days to come, helicopters buzzed overhead like a Vietnam war movie, as bodies were recovered from the hills and farmland around.

Other sights included viewing the coffins in place of curlers as the ice rink became a morgue and standing in the cold, in silence, outside the first funeral as little 10-year-old, Joanne Flanagan, was laid to rest.

For a quarter of a century, the Lockerbie story has run as an ever present thread through Scotland's news, like no other.

As the man convicted of the atrocity continues his appeal, there is no sign that this story is ready yet to rest in peace.