The houses in the street were gone

A member of the public views the Pan Am memorial window in the low chamber of Lockerbie Town Hall

By Colin Blane BBC Scotland reporter

It took time for most of us to work out what had happened at Lockerbie. I was based in Glasgow and had been covering the big Scottish stories for several years.

I took a call from the BBC's Glasgow news desk shortly before 1930 GMT that night. Details were still sketchy but there had been a plane crash in the Borders. I wondered if an RAF Jaguar might have gone down because there had been a number of low-flying training accidents there.

I began driving south within a couple of minutes of getting the call, listening to the radio and slowly forming a picture of the scale of the disaster. Access to Lockerbie was by no means straightforward.

The main A74 was blocked by debris and the traffic was jammed solid. I saw a couple of cars doing U-turns across the dual carriageway and decided to follow one on the chance the driver might be local. I was lucky.

Burning fuel sizzled in the bottom of the pit. Rooftops in the crescent were ablaze. I tried to record my impressions but struggled to make sense of what had happened.

He was a Lockerbie resident who'd been in the pub when fragments of the plane began to rain down on the roof and the street outside. The phones had gone dead so he had rushed out to let his relatives know he was all right.

I recorded his story and then followed him into Lockerbie along back roads he knew.

I arrived in the centre of the town at 2150 GMT. What I saw there has stayed with me down the years. In the square, next to the town hall, thirty or forty ambulances were parked up.

It was clear a large number of people must be involved. But the ambulances weren't going anywhere. It looked as if there had been no survivors.

Street lights had failed. There was a smell of smoke and aviation fuel. I hiked across a field to try to reach some houses which were on fire.

Rooftops ablaze

When I got there, I was, for a few moments, lost for words. I could make out the shape of a curving street but the houses on the western edge of it were no longer there.

Instead, there was a deep trench, running back down towards the dual carriageway. Burning fuel sizzled in the bottom of the pit. Rooftops in the crescent were ablaze. I tried to record my impressions but struggled to make sense of what had happened.

I later learned that a wing - laden with fuel - had come down on Sherwood Crescent, killing eleven people on the ground.

I succeeded in sending reports to Radio Four, sometimes by car-phone and occasionally from one of Lockerbie's red phone boxes.

Radio stations called me from Canada and New Zealand. I worked all night. The Today Programme sent its presenters from London and a team of engineers from Manchester.

More and more people began to arrive. Police, firefighters, search teams, journalists.

Lockerbie became known worldwide after the events of 1988

Word began to spread about some of the awful details. Dozens of bodies had fallen on the golf course; the jumbo's nose cone was lying in a field three miles outside Lockerbie; an engine had hit a house in the centre of town where dozens more bodies were lying in back gardens.

Malcolm Rifkind, the Secretary of State for Scotland, came - and his Labour shadow Donald Dewar.

Angus Kennedy was there - a reassuring presence from Strathclyde Police who were lending their resources to Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland's smallest force.

Gradually, order was brought to the emergency. We began to learn how far the wreckage had spread and what might have caused the disaster.

Small mysteries were solved. Burnt-out cars we thought had been destroyed on the road turned out to have been empty all along - scorched where they had been parked.

I didn't know it then, but that December night was the beginning of a thread which would run through the rest of my working life.

It brought me back to Lockerbie, to Arlington cemetery, to Kamp Zeist.

I saw a Libyan man convicted of the bombing and watched him delivered by helicopter to Barlinnie prison.

Later, in that same prison, I listened to Nelson Mandela argue that an innocent man was in jail.

The final chapter of the Lockerbie story has yet to be told.

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