The Bombing Of Pan Am Flight 103

At two minutes past seven on the evening of December 21, 1988, an air traffic controller at Prestwick watched a single radar return break apart into a spray of echoes over the Solway Firth. Thirty-eight minutes out of Heathrow, at 31,000 feet, a bomb the size of a paperback had gone off in the forward cargo hold of a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of the Seas.

Two hundred and fifty-nine people were aboard. Eleven more were at home on a residential street in Lockerbie, four days from Christmas, when the wings came down on top of them.

This episode...