It is one of the grim truths of journalism that interviewing a bereaved parent can become formulaic. There is no need – and it would be disrespectful – to rehearse here the most commonly expressed sentiments. The feelings are as raw as can be imagined, and are no less moving for being oft-cited. The love, plain and simple, is there for all to see.
That love is there in spades in Dr Jim Swi+re, whose daughter Flora died in the plane that exploded over the Dumfries and Galloway village of Lockerbie just a little more than 36 years ago. But far from settling for being the emotional wreck that most of us would become on losing a lovely, gifted 23-year-old daughter, public-school educated, churchgoing Jim Swire turned into an indefatigable member of the awkward squad.
Accepting the official version just isn’t his bag, as a new drama starring Colin Firth in the role of Swire, now 88, shows. Obsessive he may be, but writing him off as having lost his reason to grief just doesn’t wash. Other grieving relations, some of whom accuse him and Sky of promoting a false narrative, seem no nearer to a conclusive version of who to blame.
When Flight 103 was blown out of the sky on 21 December 1988, the initial suspicion was that it was the work of the Palestinian guerrilla group PFLP-GC, based in Damascus and put up to it by the Iranians. A US missile in the Gulf had recently shot down an Iranian commercial plane full of civilians during the Iran-Iraq war so, the argument went, it would make sense for Iran’s hardline government to retaliate with a spectacular assault on a packed Pan Am jumbo jet.
But before long, a new narrative emerged. There was evidence, apparently, that the culprits were not Iranian but Libyan. Piecing together fragments from the crash, investigators constructed a case that placed a Libyan, Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi, head of security for Libyan airlines, and another man in the spotlight, claiming they had put the bomb on the plane in Malta, before it even took off from Heathrow.
Eventually, in 2001, Megrahi was found guilty of the murder of 270 people by a special court in the Netherlands, made up of Scottish judges, and sentenced to life imprisonment. His alleged accomplice was found not guilty.
The desire for a culprit, 13 years after the atrocity, might then have been satisfied. Official opinion in the US was that justice was being served, but that this was just the start. The other purportedly guilty parties, then still being harboured by Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, were to be brought to trial. Health permitting, one of those accused is to face trial this year.
Jim Swire had been one of those demanding Megrahi be tried, and had flown to Tripoli to ask the Libyan president for the case to go ahead. But following the court case Swire was not persuaded. “I went into that court thinking I was going to see the trial of those who were responsible for the murder of my daughter,” he said later. “I came out thinking he had been framed. I am very afraid that we saw steps taken to ensure that a politically desired result was obtained.”
Last week Colin Firth, whose downbeat depiction of Swire lacks the original’s easy amiability, paid tribute to Swire’s courage, integrity and lack of dogma. Tempting though it must have been to have his cherished belief in Megrahi’s guilt maintained, he was valiant for truth. “He let evidence and facts speak to him, even if that meant profoundly changing course. That really, really struck me.”
But Swire was not alone. Large gaps in the evidence had emerged. The key piece of forensics was discredited. A key witness, paid by the CIA to appear, was hugely unimpressive, and evidence that would have helped the defence was not passed on by the Crown. Professor Hans Köchler, a UN-appointed legal adviser, called the case “inconsistent, arbitrary and a spectacular miscarriage of justice”. The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission found six reasons for believing “a miscarriage of justice may have occurred”. Megrahi, suffering from cancer, was released in 2009 – too soon for many – and died in 2012.
It seemed to Swire that the Iranian piste was quite likely the correct one after all. It suited the Americans and British to blame Libya, rather than further antagonise Iran, then holding a number of US hostages; and one major adversary in the region, the Iraqi tyrant Sadam Hussein, was plenty.
Lockerbie is a crushing reminder of the worst terrorist attack in UK history
Read MoreI remember Jim Swire telling me the US decided “to blame somebody, anybody, rather than Iran”, and noting elsewhere “the extraordinary coincidence of the first hostages being set free within a few days of the accusations being made against the two Libyans”.
Such crumbs of circumstantial evidence – and the occasional irrefutable nugget dug up notably by Swire himself and allies like John Ashton, Peter Biddulph and Paul Foot- have sustained Swire for years since he concluded Megrahi, who he was to meet in Barlinnie prison and subsequently, was innocent.
The film depicts Jane Swire’s frustration with her husband’s refusal to let the matter lie. Eleven years ago I asked Jane Swire about her husband’s campaigning: “He’s been promising to give it up for a long time. I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said, without apparent rancour. “He’s like a dog on a hunt. He has to chase every hare until he gets a narrative that makes sense. I am uncertain that we’ll ever know the truth. At the very core of it, none of it will bring Flora back. I’ve had enough to cope with.”
Jim put his arm around his wife and said: “She’s been very kind. She could have made me stop.” Jane’s reply wasn’t far wrong: “I doubt it.”
And he’s still at it. Swire said last week: “What I discovered was horrendous, and I’ve been able to discover enough about the truth to know that the official version that you and I are being solemnly told, to this day, particularly by the Americans, but also by the UK authorities, is absolute nonsense.”
In anybody’s language, Lockerbie was a scandal, whoever was to blame. The screen adaptation of Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph’s book requires concentration and is at times not easy to watch, but this outstanding TV drama doesn’t flinch, and resorts only minimally to sugar-coating.
If a screenplay can do for all the Lockerbie bereaved, the Swires and beyond, what it did for the Post Office subpostmasters, hurrah.
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth is on Sky Atlantic now
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