On 21 December 1988  the Boeing 747 Clipper Maid of the Seas was destroyed by a bomb while flying over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew aboard.

Large sections of the aircraft crashed in a residential street, Sherwood Crescent, in Lockerbie, killing 11 residents.

It is the deadliest terrorist attack in the UK.

 Of the 270 total fatalities, 190 were American citizens and forty-three were British citizens. Nineteen other nationalities were represented, with four or fewer passengers per country. The bodies of seventeen victims – ten passengers (six Americans, three Hungarians, and one Canadian) and seven Lockerbie residents – were never found, and were presumed to have been virtually “vaporized” by the fireball of the impact crater.

On 3 May 2000, the trial of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah began. Megrahi was found guilty of 270 counts of murder on 31 January 2001, and was sentenced to life imprisonment in Scotland; his co-defendant, Fhimah, was found not guilty.

Appeals followed. On 25 July 2009, Megrahi applied to be released from jail on compassionate grounds. Three weeks later, on 12 August 2009, Megrahi applied to have his second appeal dropped and was granted compassionate release for his terminal prostate cancer. On 20 August 2009, Megrahi was released from prison and travelled by chartered jet to Libya.

The main UK memorial is at Dryfesdale Cemetery about one mile (1.5 kilometres) west of Lockerbie.

In 2021 Jim Swire, whose daughter was killed in the crash, published his account ‘Lockerbie, A Father’s Search for Justice’. The book was made into a TV series starring Colin Firth. Jim Swire initially accepted the establishment results of the investigation but came to question those claims.

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