Remembering the Lockerbie Disaster
An ITV West Country Journalist was among the first reporters at the scene of Britain’s worst terrorist attack 30 years ago.
Content Editor John Alcock’s personal reflections on the Lockerbie Disaster and why it matters to him.
Incomprehensible - that was my first reaction when I arrived in Lockerbie on the night of the disaster. I was standing in the bleak winter dark on the lip of an enormous hole, where a street should have been. The freezing air stank of aviation fuel.
I was 28, a young, enthusiastic reporter for Independent Radio News and I’d spent the day covering an IRA bomb find in London. When reports first emerged that a passenger plane had apparently “landed on a petrol station” in Lockerbie, I immediately got in my car (a soulless talbot horizon) and cajoled every shaking second of speed out of it as I drove through the night to Scotland.
For the next four days I worked nearly 24 hours a day filing hourly reports. At least I found a floor to crash on. There was no accomodation to be had and the toughest reporters there were a couple of Canadian women, who lived on whisky and spent the nights wrapped in fur coats, sleeping in their cars.
It was so hard for the bereaved relatives who began arriving from across the world hoping to see their loved ones’ bodies to say their goodbyes. The police had to explain that the passengers’ remains were often destroyed or unrecognisable and in an case had to be left for days where they had landed while the forensic experts gathered every clue they could.
I have so many mixed feelings about the crash. I am proud of my reporting. I still have a Strathclyde Police tie that the press office gave me and a few others for the sensitivity we had shown reporting the tragedy.
But primarily on the anniversary I will be thinking of the people who died- both the passengers and the residents of Lockerbie, their relatives- whose lives were wrecked forever and the emergency services who did their best in a terrible situation.