21-12-1988: Pan Am Flight Tragedy

VIVAnews - In the past 24 years, the Pan Am Airlines 103 exploded and crashed in the town of Lockerbie, Scotland. Killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members and 11 local residents in Lockerbie, the U.S. airline plane incident was an act of the Libyan intelligence service.

According to The History Channel, terrorist hiding a bomb inside an audio cassette player. The device was placed in a bag that is stored in a cargo plane and exploded when the plane taking off at an altitude of 31,000 feet.
The plane's flight route from London to New York. The bomb was placed at the plane layover in Frankfurt, Germany.
In 1991, the combined U.S. and British investigations stated that Libyan intelligence agent, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was responsible for the Pan Am incident.
Parties investigators suspect that the bombing was a backlash from the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, the U.S. air raid in 1986, which killed one of Gaddafi's daughter along with dozens of others.
However, at the time Libya had refused to hand over suspects to the U.S. law enforcement agencies. In 1999, after receiving a number of United Nations sanctions, Gaddafi was willing to hand over two suspects to Scottish authorities for trial in the Netherlands, but to use legal procedure Scotland.
In early 2001, al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, while Fhimah was acquitted. In 2003, Libya was willing to take responsibility for the incident with the Pan Am willing to pay compensation to the families of the victims of U.S. $ 8 million.
 Pan Am Airlines, which went bankrupt three years after the incident in Scotland, sued the Libyan government. The suit was not in vain because the manager Pan Am received compensation of U.S. $ 30 million.
According to BBC news station, al-Megrahi died in his home in Tripoli on May 20, 2012 at the age of 60 years. Megrahi was found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment by a special court in the Netherlands in 2001.
However, in 2009, he was released from prison in Scotland on humanitarian considerations after local authorities knew Megrahi was suffering from cancer.
Sources: http://dunia.news.viva.co.id/news/read/376636