Lockerbie’s untold story
Novelist-turned-screenwriter Jonathan Lee details how years of research led him to write The Bombing of Pan Am 103, a BBC drama exploring the investigation into and response to the Lockerbie disaster in 1988.
Having grown up in the UK in the 1980s, Jonathan Lee previously used the “decade of disaster” as the basis for High Dive, his historical novel about the 1984 assassination attempt against then prime minister Margaret Thatcher at the Brighton Grand Hotel.
“I’m just kind of fascinated with that period,” he tells DQ. “It’s a period that gives us a few clues as to how we live now. It ushered in that era of insecurity or terrorism geopolitics that we are living through right now. I tend to write about recent history, whether it’s television series or my novels. Sometimes that’s the most invisible history, because we’re waiting for the dust to settle.”
It’s for that reason he believes now is the right time to explore the details behind the investigation into and response to the 1988 Lockerbie disaster. On December 21, 1988, flight Pan Am 103 was travelling from London Heathrow to New York’s JFK when a bomb exploded in its hold over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 270 people, including 43 British citizens and 190 Americans. It remains the deadliest terror attack in UK history and was the first major act of terrorism against US citizens.
Produced by World Productions, Lee’s six-part drama The Bombing of Pan Am 103 tells the previously untold story of the Scots-US investigation into the attack and its devastating effect on the town and the families who lost loved ones. From the initial exhaustive search for evidence on the ground in Scotland, via the US and Malta and the trial at Camp Zeist in 2000, the series leads up to a forthcoming trial in the US involving the man accused of building the bomb.
The launch of the series on BBC One and BBC iPlayer in the UK this Sunday marks the culmination of a seven-year journey with the project for British writer Lee. Along the way, he had to overcome delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the dual US actors and writers strikes in 2023.
“But with each passing year that we were working on it, we also discovered new things, got to interview new people who were there at the time, and got to uncover, dig into, think about and process new details,” he says. “Working on this one has made me think that writing about a real event is a bit like a criminal investigation. It’s a process of elimination, of taking things out, of realising which lines of inquiry don’t work and don’t lead to something that will illuminate the event for other people, and those that do. And it gave us more time in the end to pick through those different strands of what’s quite a complicated event that’s still evolving today.”
The cast features Connor Swindells as DS Ed McCusker, Patrick J Adams as Dick Marquise, Merritt Weaver as Kathryn Turman, Peter Mullan as DCS John Orr, Tony Curran as DCI Harry Bell and Eddie Marsan as Tom Thurman, plus Douglas Hodge, Lauren Lyle, Andrew Rothney, Phyllis Logan, Cora Bissett and more. The size of the ensemble speaks to the numerous story strands running through the series, from the local Scottish police officers who were among the first responders, to the FBI agents building their own investigation.
A former lawyer now living in the US, Lee says he wanted to avoid the “TV detective trope” where one remarkable detective solves the case “magically,” and instead focus on the fact this is a true story about investigators and families from all over the world who find themselves involved in something incredibly complex.
“Passengers from 21 countries were on that plane, and sometimes that’s a fact that’s not reflected upon,” the writer notes. Another influence on the decision to centre the drama on the investigation was the initial research done by filmmaker Adam Morane-Griffiths, who had been working on a documentary in Scotland around a decade ago when, by chance, he got to know some of the detectives who had been involved in the Lockerbie investigation.
“They started unspooling some of their stories to him and we realised that, in a way, it was the greatest untold detective story we’d come across,” Lee continues. “It was just extraordinary, some of the details they dug up. But it became fascinating to think about the way institutions and people cooperate over the course of the case as well, because at the beginning it wasn’t necessarily the case at all.”
Then when the initial project began to take shape as a drama series, Lee came on board as creator and writer. “There are so many stories where you can follow your instincts and fictionalise [the story], but this was one where we felt like we really needed a really robust underpinning in terms of understanding exactly what went on,” he says. “Adam’s been incredible at providing that, and has introduced me to so many of the investigators who really worked on it.”
Some of the details Lee discovered included the story of the Ladies of Lockerbie, villagers who gave up thousands of hours to collect and clean items they found strewn across the wreckage site and return them to the victims’ loved ones.
The local ice rink was also turned into a morgue, while hundreds of officers were joined by volunteers from all over Scotland and beyond to pick up pieces of evidence across 850 square miles, which were then used to reconstruct the 747 aircraft in a huge warehouse just outside Lockerbie.
“A lot of people don’t realise that was the biggest crime scene the world had ever seen at the time,” Lee says. “Tens of thousands of those fragments of the plane and belongings from suitcases were laid out and examined individually for signs of explosive damage. There’s just fascinating rigour of the scientific and technical investigation process that went into that. All that led to finding a tiny fragment of a radio the bomb was housed in, which is what finally unlocked the truth – or some of it.
“Had the plane exploded over the Atlantic, as was probably intended, all that would have been drowned forever. One of the world’s greatest and most consequential mysteries would never have been solved.”
The Bombing of Pan Am 103, which will also air globally on Netflix later this year, also highlights the human impact of the tragedy on the investigators, the families and the Lockerbie community as it sought to rebuild and connect with bereaved families around the world. During his research, Lee discovered local families would house the relatives of passengers who wanted to come and see where their loved ones had fallen.
“Details like that really struck me and became important for us to put into the show,” Lee says. “It also seemed to fit the wider theme of the series, which is about community and communication and cooperation, whether it’s between families, countries or law enforcement agencies.”
Compressing potentially hundreds of characters and stories into six hours of television was “terrifically difficult,” but Lee felt the appropriate approach was to look at the investigation as it unfolded on both sides of the Atlantic and then add family stories into that narrative.
“Obviously we can’t capture everyone’s stories, not even slightly, but we wanted to try to weave those stories through where we could,” Lee says. “We would speak to real detectives or FBI agents, like Dick Marquise [Adams], the lead FBI agent, and I accompanied him to a couple of different memorial events. He would introduce me to family members and we would get chatting and more and more stories would arise of the actual families that had their lives changed by his work, so a lot of the family strands run through the series.”
Under his official title of creator, lead writer and exec producer, Lee wrote four episodes of the series, with Scottish screenwriter Gillian Roger Park penning two. Morane-Griffiths is also an exec producer on the drama, which is directed by Michael Keillor (Chimerica, Best Interests).
That Park’s brother lived in Lockerbie gave a fresh perspective to the writing process, which took place over several weeks in London alongside some of the key producers. “We would try to work out what stories we could tell and those we couldn’t, and it was always changing because new research was coming all the time. We were living through it and writing it in real time in a way,” Lee says.
The writers and producers also spoke to many of the families and loved ones of the victims, and their input shaped how certain events in the series were realised, not least the moment of the explosion, which isn’t shown on screen.
“Not ‘Hollywoodising’ the moment of disaster was important to them and it was important to us,” Lee says. “It wasn’t really what the show was about, and some of them have appreciated that.
“Hopefully the series is an act of remembrance. And going to all these memorial events in the last few years, memory is the thing that keeps coming up again and again. It’s wanting to keep the event at the forefront of people’s minds, in a way, and I suppose at the heart of that is a hope that we can somehow avoid making some of the same mistakes we did in the past.”
Filming took place in Malta, Toronto and in Scotland, where Lee often joined the production and was able to meet with the actors and hear their perspectives on the characters. On one occasion, he was on set with Marsan, who plays FBI explosives expert Tom Thurman, at the same time as the real Thurman was visiting from the US.
“It was a strange experience,” he says. “In a way, it’s a character I’ve created based on a real person, and then there’s the actor who’s playing the real person and there’s the actual real person. What you see on screen is some version of all three combined. It was never less than interesting.”
With the show airing just a few months after Sky’s Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, Lee hopes The Bombing of Pan Am 103 serves as a way to bring people together, in line with its themes of communication and community.
“We all know communication is the thing that makes us human. It’s what gets us from the worst of humanity to the best of it. Yet we fail at it all the time. Our egos get in the way on a personal and political level, as we’re seeing now in America and perhaps the world generally,” he says. “Stories like this make you think about the fact we have a choice to make between whether we want to make the world a bigger place or a smaller one, [be] more unified or more divided, more generous and collaborative or more petty, and that’s what the Pan Am 103 story is for me, among other things.”
He adds: “It’s the story of these small but heroic, hard-won acts of connective humanity in the wake of a bomb that tried to blast that humanity apart. That’s something universal, specific to the story but also something timely.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth: This Sky series, which debuted at the start of 2025, focuses on Dr Jim Swire’s relentless pursuit of justice after losing his daughter in the Lockerbie tragedy.
The Salisbury Poisonings: A BBC factual drama based on the 2018 Novichok poisoning in Salisbury, which dramatises the response, investigation and public health crisis that followed.
When They See Us: Ava DuVernay’s acclaimed 2019 Netflix miniseries retells the true story of the Central Park Five – five black and Latino men who were falsely suspected of and prosecuted for the rape and assault of a white female jogger in New York’s Central Park in 1989.
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tagged in: BBC, Jonathan Lee, Netflix, The Bombing of Pan Am 103, World Productions