Thirty years ago I saw Lockerbie on fire – but I have yet to see justice done

Kim Sengupta reflects on a grotesque act of terrorism that led to 270 deaths and a legal saga which left many unanswered questions

Prime suspect: Megrahi being escorted by security officers in Tripoli (AFP/Getty)

Abdelbaset al-Megrahi lay in his bed attached to a drip, on red sheets stained by dark splashes of blood he had coughed up. An oxygen mask covered his skeletal face; his body twitched as he drifted in and out of consciousness. He was in the advanced stages of cancer: medicine he desperately needed had been plundered by looters; the doctors who had been treating him had fled.

This was in Tripoli in the winter of 2011, in the turmoil of Libya’s civil war and the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. It was a time of great violence, a dozen bodies were piled up beside a roundabout a half mile from where I had seen Megrahi lie slowly dying. They were corpses of black men lynched by the rebels because they were supposedly mercenaries fighting for the regime: though in reality, they were victims of xenophobia against African migrants which had accompanied the uprising.

Megrahi himself had been convicted of a dreadful massacre; of being responsible for 270 deaths on 21 December 1988, when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over the town of Lockerbie in Scotland. A bomb – 12 ounces of Semtex in a Toshiba radio-cassette player – had been secreted in the luggage of the plane carrying passengers to the US, many returning home for Christmas.