SHELLEY: Two hundred and seventy people were murdered in the Lockerbie bombing. Flora Swire was just twenty-three when she died. With a trial now closer than ever - will her parents finally see justice for Flora?

NEWS BULLETIN: “Good afternoon,  a decision has been reached in the dispute over where the trial of two Libyans suspected of involvement in the Lockerbie bombing should be held. America and Britain had insisted that the trial should take place in Scotland, but Libya refused to hand them over. It’s now thought the men will be tried in the Netherlands before a panel of Scottish judges.”

 Jim Swire fields media calls.......

SHELLEY: August on the Isle of Skye. From a hotel bedroom Jim Swire fields calls from the world’s media. It’s the first day of his summer holiday, but Lockerbie is leading the news, so everything else is put on hold.

Jim Swire’s eldest daughter, Flora, was among the victims of the Lockerbie bombing. For almost ten years he’s been a spokesman for the UK Families Flight 103 Group working tirelessly to discover the truth about Lockerbie. So today’s news is a significant milestone. A criminal trial may finally establish who killed his daughter, and, just as important, why.

JIM: We just want a fair trial to find out whether these two did or did not become involved in the murder of our loved ones, it’s  as simple as that.

SHELLEY: For almost ten years this aircraft hangar in Farnborough has held the shattered remains of Pan-Am flight 103. Air accident  investigators painstakingly reconstructed the whole of the front cargo hold to establish exactly how the bomb ripped through the jumbo jet 30,000 feet above Lockerbie. In the event of a trial it will be a crucial piece of evidence. For the families of the 270 people who died though it’s a haunting reminder of how their lives were torn apart on 21st December 1988. Even before Lockerbie, Scotland has always played an important part in the lives of Jim and Jane Swire. Jim grew up on Skye and most family holidays are still spent there. But this year the tranquillity has been broken by news of a possible Lockerbie trial.

JIM SWIRE: I always had a feeling that somehow Scotland was going to be the absolute key in resolving these issues, and it’s a very strange thing that I’d been pestering the Foreign Office for the last three weeks about when this announcement was going to be made, and they were promising they’d give me forty-eight hours notice and all this stuff.

Well they didn’t do that, so off we came up to Skye and the next morning they broke the announcement. But I have a feeling that was a good thing, because I just feel I can make more impact based here than anywhere else in the world, and although it’s very difficult communication-wise, I think that the.  . . .both Jane and I have learnt that we don’t have control over these media jamborees that take place whenever there’s an announcement. They happen to us. That’s something we can’t control. And all we can do, the best you can do is behave like the Boy Scouts and be prepared, and that’s why I brought up with me the phone, and the fax machine and all the rest of it. I’ve come to understand and Jane’s come to understand how the media work, and if you don’t accommodate them when they want you they forget you. I’m saying we have no choice, we have to go with it. But I think a lot has to be said. . . ..

JANE SWIRE: Things will settle down now, and we'll enjoy a family holiday.

JIM: Oh yes.

JANE: And we have William coming tomorrow evening and Cathy next week. So we’re all with friends, we will enjoy it and have a family holiday in peace and quiet I hope. We used to have lovely family holidays here with all the children and they loved the freedom and the beach, and  friends at the farm, and cousins to play with. It was a lovely place for children to spend a holiday.

Jim and Jane watch family film with baby Flora......
 JANE AND JIM: And this is Skye.

JANE: Yes, goodness, I’m trying to keep her out of the sea. She wanted to go in.

(Jim and Jane laughing…..)

 JANE: That hasn’t changed has it?

JIM: I’m disobeying you by letting her go in.

JANE: Oh yes, trying to keep her from getting very wet. I’m sure it was cold. I’d completely forgotten. . . .

JIM: ….I haven’t seen these for years.

JANE: Em. . . .lovely.

JIM: You get so much more idea about a child from motion picture than you do from a still, don’t you?

JANE: Em, you forget the funny ways they walk when they’re little.

JIM: The little mannerisms, yes.

JANE: Little broad based walk they have.

JANE: Flora was always good fun to be with. She was always a jolly child really, and em. . . .quick and bright, and enthusiastic and just a great, great pleasure. She gave us such pleasure all through her childhood. I mean, she was just great.

Swire children singing........

JANE: She was good hear a tune and could reproduce it perfectly. She had a very good ear that musical people had. So she. . . .and she learned to play the piano and guitar and gave us a lot of pleasure, and at Christmas she would always bring the guitar out and we’d sing.  It’s so difficult to remember everything because she was such a multi-faceted person that I’m sure I’m leaving things out. But she was a very big influence on all of us in this family because she was strong, and vibrant, and full of humour and fun, and you didn’t not notice Flora. If she came into a room everyone noticed her. I think she rather enjoyed that. She was never a shrinking violet at all, ever. She was a person to be reckoned with from the minute she arrived and enjoyed that, but in a nice way.

JIM: Flora wanted to know all the time how something, why did something happen and why does that do that, and why does that look like that. And I always wanted to know that too, I was a kind of boy who took things apart to find how it entirely works, and then of course usually couldn’t put them back together again. And Flora was the same. That intelligent inquisitiveness that enables you to acquire knowledge, she was like that all the time. So she was tremendously rewarding to work with for me, because she seemed to see things in the same way as I did right from the start. She was also, as it happens, a very beautiful girl. And eh, you know what dads are like about their daughters. And em, she really was a stunner because she had that lovely Celtic colouring of dark hair and blue eyes. And em, somehow that makes it hit all the harder because. . . .because she was as beautiful as she was, and I think one, in a way, sum it up by saying that she was a very unusual combination of beauty and brains, because she worked so hard in her young life that she had got to a very distinguished position for her age and opportunities by the time she died. I mean she’d been invited to work at the country’s leading neurology institute in Queens Square. She’d been about the brightest medical student that they’d seen in Nottingham.

JANE: She worked with HIV and Alzheimer patients in the area of memory. So I feel so sad that the world’s lost someone very special and very . . . .very capable and able in Flora who would have contributed greatly to the world’s knowledge really. Very, very sad.

SHELLEY: It was a last minute decision to spend Christmas with her boyfriend in America. Flora only bought her ticket the day before the flight.

JANE: I remember, you know, as I kissed her goodbye, I just said: “Have a lovely time with Hart”, that was her boyfriend,  “and I’ll see you on the 5th of January”, “yes mum”, gave me a big hug and kiss, “see you on the 5th”. And it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t ever see her alive again.

SHELLEY: The following night, on the eve of Flora’s twenty-fourth birthday Pan-Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie.

JANE: I’d been late-night shopping trying to get these last minute presents, and I’d come in at about half past eight, and turned the television on, and there was an interruption and a news bulletin about this Pan-Am flight that had gone down over Lockerbie, and immediately my heart began to pound, because it then mentioned it was the six o’clock flight, and I knew that was her flight. So from the very beginning I was full of dread and horror. I remember going in to Jim, who was working in the study, and I said: “You must come and watch the nine o’clock news because there’s been this plane that’s gone down”.

JIM: What I saw on the screen was a picture of the gable end of a bungalow, a gable end with a chimney in the masonry, and the roof all gone, and the flames all round the gable end. And it was just like one of the many roads that we have in Skye where houses have been abandoned. And there were flames all round. And that somehow got into my subconscious and that’s what I used to have nightmares about. As it became clear that Flora had been on that plane the. . . . the nightmares involved things like imagining what it must have been like for her to die in such a terrible way. And it had added horror so quickly because something like Lockerbie is combined as the worst of both worlds. I mean it’s total chance that she happened to be on that particular plane that night. What did she see? what did she sense? How long was she conscious?

JANE: I have a terrible feeling she could have known something about what had happened in the last few seconds of her life, and that I felt so sad I wasn’t there to have held her hand and to have been with her. After all every parent is there at the beginning of their childhood, and at birth, and you want to be with them at their end too, if that’s what happens. Just terrible. . . . I felt she was alone on that plane, no one from the family was with her, it tortures me a bit that she was alone.

SHELLEY: All two hundred and fifty nine passengers and crew on board the jumbo jet were killed, as well as eleven people on the ground. Air accident investigators soon established that the explosion had been caused by a terrorist bomb. Did you ever manage to feel anger towards the people who had done this?

JANE: I wish I did because anger is such a positive thing, anger is. . . a positive feeling which can help you through. But I just felt terrible, terrible gutting sadness, anguish, not anger. And Jim felt anger, I envied him his anger. That helps, gives you something to fight with. But I didn’t have that, I just felt so sad, shredded really.

SHELLEY: The more facts that emerged about the bombing the angrier Jim became. Even in the first few months he suspected that his daughter’s death could have been avoided.

JIM: I think one of the things that triggered off was that very early on someone had discovered that there had been a warning, and the problem of that warning was that it was awfully specific, because it showed coloured pictures of a tape recorder made into a bomb. And by then we knew that it had been a bomb that had done this and we knew that that warning had been passed through Interpol to British Intelligence and British Aviation Security. And of course that immediately made me ask: “why didn’t they do something about it?”. My anger was fuelled by the fact that when we asked the then Conservative Government: “Can we have an Inquiry into why security and Intelligence failed to do anything?”. We got the flat response: “No you can’t”, so we said “Why not?”, and they said “it wouldn’t be in the national  interest”. And that really made my determination so strong that it’s. . . . . . . . .well it’s carried on for ten years.

JANE: There are a lot of questions that he’s asking and he wants those questions answered. And I understand that.

SHELLEY: Are there questions you need answers to?

JANE: Less. . . . I mean compared with the loss of Flora, that precious relationship, all these things seem to me almost  irrelevant. But they’re not, of course, because for the rest of society they’re very, very important.

SHELLEY: Back in November 1991 it seemed Jim was on the verge of getting at least some answers. Two Libyans were accused of planting and detonating the Lockerbie bomb. But the Libyan, Colonel Gaddafi, was reluctant to release them for  trial. So, in December, Jim travelled to Tripoli to try to make him change his mind.

JIM: The first meeting was quite funny in a way, because he was at least as terrified as I was. And I had a briefcase which contained presents for him, which was full of  things like books about Skye and Scotland because someone had told me he was interested in the Highlands. So there was a lot about Skye, there was a book my mother had written about Skye, and of course they wouldn’t let me take the briefcase in in case there was a bomb or a Uzi in it or something.

And I went up . . . .absolutely scared stiff and I said eh “Thank you for meeting me Colonel” and he sort of shook hands and  things, and I said “You know Colonel, I’m not sure you’re not  more scared than I am”, and two interpreters . . . .what would happen if I said that, and I got the message back through the interpreters “what do you mean?”, and I said “Well, you know, I’ve brought some presents and I’m not even allowed to bring the presents in”, and thank God he laughed.

I was cursed as somebody who was. . . .had left his brain behind, gone to visit the devil, all this kind of stuff. But there were the non-thinkers who said those sort of things because if you don’t negotiate with somebody how can you ever come to a reasonable agreement with them.

SHELLEY: But his fellow partners in his GP practice didn’t see it that way. They felt Jim was spending too much time on the Campaign. While he was in Libya they sacked him.

JIM: It was a terrible time for Jane because she saw everything that was helping to keep the family together in terms of physical accoutrements, like houses and standard of  living and everything very seriously threatened by that event. But that was followed by re-establishment as a worker in the same practice without actually being a partner, and that had unexpected benefits, because it means that although I had much less money, I had much greater freedom, and the staff have been quite incredibly helpful in ensuring that in so far as possible I have the freedom to say “OK, I’ve got to go to Cairo the day after tomorrow, sorry I won’t be in for surgery”.

SHELLEY: After a decade of dealing with the media, travelling the globe and meeting world leaders, Jim is no longer the political innocent he once was.

JIM: You have to remember this was coming from a background of being a GP in a quiet country town, and in those days I believed that governments, believe it or not I believe that government more or less did what they said they were doing. Nowadays I’m sorry to say that many of the politicians have no sense of values at all, and nothing that I would call a sense of right and wrong. It’s a terrible thing to say but that’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I’m afraid some of  the people I’ve come across really make me cringe.

JANE: In a way, yes, this has taken over Jim’s life. But I didn’t see another way for him that he could follow because he so much needed to do this.

JIM: One of the things that drives me on I think could be described as a sense of loyalty or a sense of honour in terms of Flora’s memory. I feel that what I want to achieve is something which is in itself good, to somehow drag something good out of something so dreadfully evil as the Lockerbie disaster. I think this is my grieving process. I think Jane understands that better than anybody, that I would not have got through the past ten years if I had been forced to sit on my hands and do nothing. This is my outlet, if you like.

There is boiling anger about the thought that my daughter may have been used as political canon fodder by those working in the international sphere at that time, and that other people may have been protected and she was not. How dare they, and to a great extent I’ve felt very often that eh, a lot of this is directly in honour of the way Flora would have behaved, and that meant also that it was limited to some extent by the knowledge that Flora would not have wanted me to behave in such a way as to damage the other members of the family who she loved so much. That means mainly her mum, Jane.

JANE: Jim’s tried not to intrude too much when we’re together with the family with his Campaign. But sometimes it does of course, inevitably, and I think Flora would say ‘Now leave off dad, you’ve still got a wife and two children, they need you,  they need you and your enthusiasm and your fun and humour and guts in their lives too, and not just in a campaign.

SHELLEY: No matter how often the Campaign intrudes though, the family do all they can to honour Flora’s memory. In a ruined chapel on Skye her ashes now lie alongside the graves of Jim’s parents. At home in Worcestershire the Swires have created a living memorial - four hundred trees planted in the shape of an ‘F’. This forms part of Flora’s Wood.

JIM: When Lockerbie happened I remember physically feeling unable to do anything, and some friends of ours came along and just dug the bundles of trees into the ground so they wouldn’t die. And the first I remember is dragging a few of  those trees out of the ground and taking. . . . .they’d make a better memorial than the ordinary sort of granite slabs that one has around the place. And that’s when we came to realise we were going to change the plan of the planting of the trees and things so as to make it into a wood in commemoration of Flora.

The one very nice that happened was that the expert we had in from the Forestry Commission to advise us as to what trees to plant went off off his own bat to the Ordnance Survey and basically persuaded them to mark this wood on the Ordnance Survey maps as Flora’s Wood, which is lovely, because not does it warm the cockles of the heart a bit, but also it means that it would be very difficult for anybody in future ever to chop this down now it is a feature on the map.

 JANE: The . .. . . .trees. . . .is always. . . in a way in some ways is almost hurting because I always feel Flora should be here to see it too. And she isn’t.

JIM: That’s the central core, she lost everything. Just got the threshold of her adult life, and just leaves it all and nothing can undo that. However we have to make what good we can for some good to come out of such evil. And I think a generation of beautiful things is good. So it’s a little good. But  nothing compared with losing Flora.

JANE: No. No.

SHELLEY: December is a difficult month for the Swires, but more so this year as the tension focuses both on the tenth anniversary of Lockerbie, and on the impending trial.

JANE: Some days are more hard than other. I mean there can be those times when pictures of everyday life trigger off vivid memories of Flora and they’re quite hard, and I know for Jim  it’s the sight of curly dark hair cascading down the back a young woman. And often for me it’s children, their little pink knees or children singing, something like that, that’s what triggers the immense waves of sadness, a lump to the throat, and tears to the eye really. There is to be this service at Westminster Abbey and I shall go to that in the evening with Jim, and Cathy and William will be there. They will find it very, very difficult to go, because in a way although these ceremonies are very important as a public statement of what a horrendous act of terrorism that disaster was, for them it’s still a very personal loss.

JIM: Well, I’m preparing a sort of centre piece for the service in the Abbey, and it’s one that we used about five years ago and it’s been mouldering in my wet garage for five years, so it’s not in mint condition. But basically it consists of a kind of reflective ladder on which there are two hundred and seventy candles in  a little blue shroud, blue for Pan-Am’s colour. And because it has a mirror at each end the congregation will see a virtually continuous assent slope of candles ascending up into the walls of the Abbey. There is something  very special about candles and it signifies perhaps the soul, the life, the essence to some extent. I think it’s restrained, it’s dignified, and last time people were kind enough to say it was beautiful.

JANE: I think if Jim hadn’t been such a high profile person in all this I would probably just be very quiet on my own, and remember . . . . .remember Flora in my way.

SHELLEY: Beyond the tenth anniversary though is the prospect of a lengthy trial in the Netherlands. Jim expects to sit through months of evidence. But even when that’s over the full facts surrounding his daughter’s murder may still not be known.

JIM: There are lots of questions that we shall not get the answers to. And if you look at the trial situation the two we’re  going to put on trial are accused of being what amounts to minnows in a huge pond. They’re not ringleaders, and it leads the question of who originated and so on. Whether that will ever be resolved I honestly don’t know. It depends on the whim of international politics at which of course individuals have no control.

SHELLEY: What if this is another false stone, that the plans for a trial are stalled somehow, how will that affect you personally?

JIM: Well, I should be extremely disappointed, because it’s been something we’ve been working for so specifically and so hard.

JANE: The Campaign I think will have a beginning, a middle and I hope an end. Whether we really get to know the truth is a little uncertain. I mean, maybe we’ll never know, we’ll certainly know that we haven’t got Flora any more, and that’s really, really, . . . really sad. I haven’t got the words to describe the sense of loss that I think we all feel. Beautiful music, or lovely scenery, that one is left bereft of words to describe really deep things, and they’re silencing. . . . .

ENDS/