Why I grieve for those I never knew

Down below, in streets scarred by jagged chunks of wreckage from the doomed aircraft, grim-faced emergency service teams searched continually for bodies as night shrouded the true extent of the horrors around them.

For everyone - residents, emergency teams, journalists - they were desperate, dark hours as they struggled hopelessly to come to terms with what had happened.

But it was only when the first fingers of dawn streaked the skies that the full enormity of the tragedy became clear, daylight revealing bodies which had spewed grotesquely from the shattered airliner.

I was a newspaper reporter at the time, sent to do my job and move on to the next one, and yet the events of that wicked December night 12 years ago stay with me as clear and sharp today as when they first unfolded in the little Scottish border town.

Yesterday, those memories came flooding back as Libyan intelligence agent Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi was found guilty of the biggest single act of mass murder in British peacetime history and sentenced to life imprisonment.

After an 84-day trial at the specially-constructed Scottish court at Camp Zeist in Holland, three judges delivered a unanimous verdict that he murdered 270 people by planting the bomb which blew the New York-bound plane apart in 1988.

I was working on Wearside at the time and, as I travelled north with photographer Gilbert Johnston, initial reports suggested that two RAF jet fighters had collided

As we approached the town, the first sign that anything had happened was those helicopters overhead, the noise of their clattering rotor blades filling the air.

But the first indication that something altogether more awful had occurred was the severed aeroplane nose cone which had landed on a hillside just above the town, narrowly missing an historic church.

Two bodies, hastily covered in blankets, lay in front of the remarkably intact blue and white cone, which had embedded itself in the middle of a field.

In Lockerbie down below, we passed shards of wreckage littering normally quiet residential streets, part of an engine in front of a bungalow, twisted pieces of metal blocking roads plunged into darkness because their street lamps had been shattered.

House windows had been blown out and a filling station stood blackened and smouldering, gutted by a blaze which appeared to have been started by falling shrapnel.

All over town, emergency crews battled with numerous other fires and the usually busy carriageways of the nearby A74 Glasgow road were strewn with burnt-out cars.

And no one knew where the people from the row of houses in Sherwood Crescent had gone, homes and bodies alike swallowed up by a huge smoking crater.

As the hours passed, it became clear that the plane had split into three parts, the cone plummeting to earth on the hillside, the main fuselage crashing in the middle of town and the fuel tanks causing the fireball which devastated Sherwood Crescent.

For many people, the first realisation that this was more than a RAF crash came as they discovered flight bags, bread rolls, knives and forks and, most poignantly, Christmas presents, lying in streets and gardens.

Others knew immediately; one eyewitness told me how he watched in horror as the gleaming fuselage, the wings ripped off, swooped silently over houses before tipping out its load of bodies, 62 piling up in gardens near his home.

Rescue crews, local people and the first journalists on the scene also realised pretty quickly what had happened as they stumbled across bodies hanging from trees and lying on the golf course.

The bomb had exploded at 7.03pm, shortly after the Boeing 747 had taken off from London Heathrow, and had claimed the lives of 259 men, women and children on board. Most were Americans going home for Christmas. Eleven residents of Lockerbie also died. Some bodies were never found.

Rumours on the night suggested that an air stewardess had lived for a few minutes after hitting the ground. Others, surely, had at least a few moments in which they realised they were dying.

The spectre of death was never far away for those on the ground either and, as we stood silent and sombre above the town waiting for dawn to rise over the nose cone, first light revealed a naked torso on the hillside opposite, undiscovered by the night time searchers.

And all the time, the clatter of helicopters.

In the years which followed, Lockerbie has found a new sense of community, local people talking in the months afterwards of examining their town in the wake of tragedy and finding it wanting. The town has, literally, come back from the dead and, the following year, the Christmas lights, so cruelly extinguished in 1988, twinkled brightly in its streets.

But for the local people who want to be known for more than living in the town where the plane crashed, days like yesterday will bring it all back. As it will bring it back for all of us.

I was lucky; I lost no loved ones and, like many people, did not even know where Lockerbie was before the bomb went off and yet, like everyone there that night, I have been touched by what happened.

In my 20 years as a journalist, I have covered all sorts of awful events, including the air crash at Kegworth in the East Midlands, a couple of weeks after Lockerbie, the horrendous multiple road pile-up and fireball on the A1(M) in Sedgefield several years ago and countless gruesome murders.

And yet Lockerbie is the only story which reduced me to tears - they crept up on me without warning three days later - because, I think, it was on a scale too large for the human mind to comprehend.

And still, like others who were there, it draws me back time and time again. Back to stand silently on the windswept Dryfesdale Cemetery above the town and read the names on the memorial, gaze upon the freshly-laid tributes which are always there, and wonder if those standing nearby come to remember lost loved ones.

And, yes, back to grieve for those I never knew.