The Mammoth Book of New Csi (20 page)

Even so, the crime scene investigation team went into action again. Wearing protective clothing and using a range of gardening equipment, they searched an 80 ft (25 m) stretch of land alongside a railway embankment beneath Copnor Bridge in Portsmouth where Lace said he had thrown Teresa’s cross and chain, her necklace bearing her name, three rings, a bracelet and her keys. They dug down several inches below the surface, but their efforts proved fruitless.

“Since Teresa’s murder there has been a lot of disturbance and redevelopment around the railway track,” said DCI McTavish, “but there was still a possibility that items may have lay undisturbed. Although we have not been able to recover any items linked to either Teresa or the suspect, it was important we did everything to explore this final aspect of the case.”

Meanwhile, the forensic scientists at the FSS were kept busy with testing old crime scene samples using the latest DNA-profiling techniques.

A
T
6.25
P.M. ON
21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 took off from London’s Heathrow Airport twenty-five minutes behind schedule. The Boeing 747 was carrying 243 passengers and sixteen crew members.

The plane was heading for New York and on board were both Britons and Americans heading for the United States for the Christmas holiday, among them thirty-five of a party of thirty-eight students from Syracuse University who had been studying abroad and were going home to spend the holiday with their families. Others were on more serious business. Bernt Carlsson, a Swede and chief administrative officer for the United Nations’ Council for Namibia, was flying to New York to sign an accord on Namibia’s independence.

Thirty-seven minutes after take-off, Flight 103 was cruising at 31,000 ft – 6 miles (9.7 km) high – over the Scottish border. The plane was flying at 434 knots (500 miles an hour). James MacQuarrie, the fifty-five-year-old American pilot, and his fifty-two-year-old co-pilot Raymond Wagner, switched on the autopilot and settled down for a routine transatlantic flight. As they gave their instruments one final check, the air traffic controller at Shanwick gave them radio clearance for their flight over the Atlantic.

Outside it was cold and dark. During the climb, intermittent rain had splattered against the cockpit’s reinforced windscreen. Now the 115-knot jet stream was creating light turbulence. Below them, clouds at around 16,000 ft covered the Scottish landscape.

A precisely 7.02 and 50 seconds in the evening, over the tiny village of Castlemilk 3 miles (4.8 km) south of Lockerbie, a terrorist bomb planted in a radio-cassette player in the plane’s baggage hold exploded. It weighed less than a pound.

The baggage hold was in front of the plane’s left wing. The bomb went off just 25 in. (64 cm) from the skin of the fuselage. The shock wave punched a hole in the side of the plane sending burning baggage out into the freezing air. It ripped through the jumbo’s main electrical cables. Captain MacQuarrie had no chance to make a Mayday call. The flight recorder only captured the sound of the explosion before its power failed.

Then came the full force of the blast. It stretched the fuselage skin. Within a second, it blistered and busted. Around the five-foot hole, the edges “petalled” outwards in a starburst. The blast was also channelled upwards causing the passenger compartment to buckle and break. Everyone on broad had heard the explosion. Shock waves also travelled down the air conditioning, reverberating through the cabin. Those in the forward section and those on the left-hand side of the first-class section on the upper deck suffered minor injuries from the blast.

People sitting directly over the left wing felt the plane disintegrating beneath them. The starburst around the hole was rapidly unzipping. One petal tore back as far as the wing. A second ripped forward 43 ft (13 m) and a third tore around under the belly of the plane almost up to the windows on the starboard side. A passenger plane is only held together by its thin skin. It does not have a metal chassis like a car. With such severe damage, the forces on it will rip it apart.

Amid the sound of tearing metal and popping rivets, the aircraft nosedived. The flight-control cables had been severed by the explosion and it rolled to the left. The left side of the forward fuselage ripped open and the entire nose section twisted upwards and to the right. The cockpit turned all the way around until it was facing the back of the plane, then broke way. It hit the right wing, knocking the inner engine off its stanchion. The nose hit the tailplane causing extensive damage. From there the body of the plane travelled in an increasingly steep flight path until, by 19,000 ft, it was travelling vertically downwards.

On the way down, both the nose and the fuselage spilled their contents. The aerodynamic effects of the plane’s steep dive tore the remaining three engines off the wings. Around 9,000 feet, the rear of the cabin broke away and disintegrated, scattering bits of the cabin floor, the rear baggage hold and the landing gear across the fields and houses below.

It was a quiet Wednesday evening in the small Scottish village of Lockerbie when Myra Bell looked out of the window of her flat. As she looked out of the southern edge of the village, she saw a huge black object falling from the sky. She realized that it was a passenger plane and all the people on board were going to die.

A wing filled with more than 200,000 lbs (90,000 kg) of aviation fuel crashed into Sherwood Crescent at 200 mph (322 km/h). It crashed into the houses at the end of the crescent, leaving a huge crater 100 ft long and 30 ft deep (30 × 9 m). The fireball could be seen 6 miles (10 km) away. Those in the rest of the crescent felt the terrible heat and air being sucked out of their houses. The force of the blast sent Robert Jardine flying across his living room. When he looked out of the window he saw that the home of his neighbours, the Flannigan family, had disappeared. The body of ten-year-old Joanne Flannigan was found in the wreckage of their home. Those of her parents, forty-fouryear-old Thomas and forty-one-year-old Kathleen, were never found. The home of John and Rosaleen Somerville and their children, thirteen-year-old Paul and ten-year-old Lyndsey, had disappeared too. Their bodies had been vaporized in the impact. Eleven residents of Lockerbie died in the disaster.

The main body of the fuselage landed 350 yards (320 m) from the Townfoot service station, which went up in flames. The ball of fire that had been number three engine hit the town. The nose section buried itself in a hilltop 3 miles (4.8 km) from the east of the Lockerbie. The other engines hit the Netherplace area. One hit the water main.

Nearby, the seismic station belonging to the British Geological Survey registered 1.6 on the Richter scale. The main impacts occurred at 7.03 p.m., 36.5 and 46 seconds after the bomb had gone off. Some local residents thought there had been an earthquake; others thought that two low-flying fighters had collided. Keith Paterson thought that the Chapelcross nuclear power station had exploded. He only discovered what had really happened when he grabbed a torch and went outside. In the dark, he saw two eyes looking up at him. They belonged to a dead body. All 259 people on board Flight 103 were dead – or soon would be. It was later discovered that some people had miraculously survived the crash and may have lived for some time after they hit the ground, but by the time they were found it was too late.

The first fire engine arrived at 7.10 p.m., eight minutes after the bomb went off. Rescuers were soon combing the area for survivors. It was an impossible task. Wreckage from the plane was spread over an arc 80 miles (130 km) long. The local police and volunteers, including a police surgeon from Yorkshire named Dr Fieldhouse, continued the search for survivors for twenty-four hours. All those they found where dead. Captain MacQuarrie’s body was found on the grass outside the cockpit. Inside the nose section rescuers found another fifteen bodies, nearly all of them cabin crew or first-class passengers.

Christine Copeland found the body of a young woman in her garden. It turned black before her eyes. The body of a young man landed on the front doorstep of Esther Galloway. For the next three days she had to step over it while the accident investigators went about their work. But most of the bodies were not intact and the emergency services had to set about the grim task of finding body parts.

Every body part had to be examined by a doctor, photographed, numbered and tagged before it could be removed. Some pieces had to be dug out of the rubble or cut out of the wreckage of the aircraft. This was a gruesome and laborious business. Some bodies were not removed until five nights after the crash.

From the beginning, it was clear that the crash site was also a crime scene. One week before Flight 103 was blown from the skies, the American Embassy in Finland received a message from an anonymous caller saying: “There will be a bombing attempt against a Pan American aircraft flying from Frankfurt to the United States.”

Flight 103 had originated in Frankfurt. Passengers from Germany travelled on a 727 to London, but the flight used the same number. At Heathrow, the passengers and luggage were transferred to the 747, along with more passengers from Britain and others on connecting flights from elsewhere.

The warning was forwarded to the American embassy in Germany. Embassy staff actually cancelled their reservations with Pan Am. Surveillance was stepped up, but the general public was not alerted.

Other warnings were received. One was accompanied by a photograph of a bomb inside a Toshiba radio-cassette player wired to a barometric time switch. It was similar to one found in West Germany, just two months before Flight 103 was downed, when Hafez Kassem Dalkamoni was arrested while visiting an electrical shop in Frankfurt. He was the right-hand man of Ahmed Jibril, a former Syrian Army captain and leader of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), a splinter group that hired itself out to states that sponsored terrorism. Accompanying Dalkamoni was known bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat. The radio-cassette bomb was found in the trunk of their car. It had Semtex plastic explosive moulded to fit inside the case, a time-delay switch and a simple barometric switch that activated the bomb when the air pressure dropped with altitude. It usually took seven or eight minutes for the plane to reach the height that tripped the barometric switch, then a timer detonated the bomb half-an-hour later. It was between thirty-seven and thirty-eight minutes after Flight 103 left Heathrow that it was blown from the skies over Lockerbie.

Dalkamoni admitted that he has supervised Khreesat when he had built bombs into the Toshiba radio-cassette player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He also said that a second Toshiba radio-cassette bomb had been made. While Dalkamoni was prosecuted in Germany, Khreesat was released. Later it became clear that he was working undercover for a Jordanian intelligence organization, which itself had been set up by the CIA.

It was known that the four other bombs Dalkamoni and Khreesat had built were somewhere at large. On 9 November 1988, Interpol circulated warnings. At Heathrow Airport, security staff were told to be extra vigilant when “screening or searching radios, radio-cassette players and other electrical equipment”.

At the time, the motive for the crime seemed all too obvious. In July 1988, the US battleship
Vincennes
had shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in the Persian Gulf. There were 290 passengers on board, many of them pilgrims on their way to Mecca. No one survived. A TV crew were on board at the time, so the incident was screened worldwide. President Reagan then claimed the
Vincennes
was under attack and decorated the ship’s commander and crew.

Meanwhile, Tehran Radio said that the passengers and crew would be avenged in “blood-splattered skies”. The US Air Force Command warned that the Iranians would strike back in a “tit for tat fashion” producing “mass casualties”. The warning went on to say: “We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack . . . due to the large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist infrastructures in place.” Soon after, the CIA noted that Ahmed Jibril met with Iranian officials and offered the services of the PFLP-GC.

As a crime scene, the Lockerbie crash site was impossible to manage. Covering 850 square miles (2,200 km
²
), it was impossible to seal off. Immediately, it was scoured by the rescue services, the army, the police and emergency volunteers looking for survivors, as well as accident investigators and airline personnel. And people lived there. Residents reported men wearing the insignia of the FBI and Pan Am, though some of them were clearly not airline staff at all. There were other men wearing no insignia. Unmarked helicopters flew overhead, carrying men with rifles and telescopic sights.

There were clear signs of interference with the evidence. A suitcase belonging to Major Charles McKee, a Defense Intelligence Agency operative flying back to the United States to report his misgivings about condoning the couriering of drugs to entrap dealers in the United States, was found to have had a hole cut in the side after the explosion, while the clothes inside carried no trace of explosives. A Scottish farmer found a suitcase full of white powder – heroin, a local police officer told him. There is no record of any heroin being recovered. More disturbingly, all but two of the labels that Dr Fieldhouse had put on the bodies he had found had gone missing.

As a crime scene, the crash site was in the jurisdiction of Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, the smallest police force in the UK. So officers from all over Scotland and northern England were drafted in. Over a thousand police officers and soldiers carried out a fingertip search of the crash site for evidence. This lasted for months. Divided into groups of eight or ten, they were told: “If it isn’t growing and it isn’t a rock, pick it up.”They were asked to pay particularly attention to items that were charred as they might have been close to an explosion.

High-resolution satellite photographs were used to locate the wreckage and helicopters carrying thermographic cameras scoured the local woods. Every item picked up was tagged, placed in a clear plastic bag, labelled and taken to the gymnasium of a local school. There, everything was X-rayed and checked for explosive residue with a gas chromatograph, after which the information was entered into the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System. In all, searchers retrieved more than 10,000 items from the fields and forests of southern Scotland.