‘The faces stay with you. It was a war zone’
Nearly 30 years after 270 people died in the worst terror attack on British soil, some of Lockerbie’s silent witnesses talk to Joe Shute for the first time
The evening of Wednesday December 21 1988 was typical for the Murdoch family. They had been for supper at the canteen in the Lockerbie ice rink – where the whole family would practise curling – and shortly before 7pm, as her husband headed out on to the ice for an evening session, Marion Murdoch gathered up her children, Nancy, 18, and David, 10, to drive them home.
As she turned on to Carlisle Road, which runs through the town, they suddenly heard an “excruciating” sound of screaming metal and felt the car begin to shake.
“It grew louder and louder and I distinctly remember telling Mum to drive faster,” recalls David, now 40 and the national coach of Great Britain’s curling team. “The car felt like it was literally bouncing and I remember looking out the back window to see a mushroom cloud behind us. You would never imagine such devastation – a 747 landing on our town.”
Pan Am Flight 103 had taken off from Heathrow just 38 minutes previously, with 243 passengers and 16 crew members on board, bound for New York. But as the plane traversed the Scottish borders, a suitcase bomb containing 1lb (450g) of plastic explosives fitted to a timer was detonated.
Burning debris and bodies rained down over Lockerbie (the epicentre of a wider radius stretching hundreds of miles). Nobody on board survived and a further 11 people from the town died. To this day it remains the worst ever terror attack on British soil.
Even 30 years on, the aftermath continues to be felt by all those present: from civilians to members of the emergency services. Many were left profoundly traumatised by events. Some, to this day, have been unable to publicly discuss the true horror of what they faced.
Robert Togneri is among those who has never previously given a media interview, but appears in a new documentary tonight called Lockerbie:
The Unheard Voices. The then 32-yearold police officer had recently moved to the town with his wife and two young children. He was off duty that night, but when he saw the sky “light up in flames”, rushed out to help. “The body parts were more than you could count,” he recalls. “It was so hard to comprehend.”
Togneri spent the following weeks assisting with the investigation. One day he was tasked with driving a van containing more than 600 bags of body parts from the Lockerbie ice rink – which had been transformed into a makeshift morgue – to the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle.
A few days later he found himself in an industrial unit marshalling attempts to X-ray the remains. “There were marker boards containing lists numbered from one to 270 and the whole place reeked of formaldehyde,” he says. “To this day the smell triggers very unpleasant memories.”
At the time there was little in the way of trauma management within the emergency services. Togneri was convinced he was not suffering any after-effects, but as the months passed became increasingly withdrawn from his family. He admits things reached a point where he contemplated suicide.
“Professionally, nobody noticed, but I tried to push my wife away,” he says. “I caused her a lot of pain. I was never aggressive or violent but simply shrank away. It worsened every year around the anniversary. I just kept asking myself: why?”
David Whalley was the senior leader coordinating the mountain rescue teams during the clean-up operation. The now 65-year-old, who at the time was based with the RAF Leuchars mountain rescue team, had attended hundreds of incidents. But even that could not prepare him for the carnage.
By first light after the crash, they had already discovered 160 bodies. Required to preserve the crime scene, rescuers covered them with anything they could, to preserve their dignity – as well as avoiding looking at their faces. “It didn’t matter because the faces stay with you,” he says. “It was like a war zone.”
Eventually the experience would lead to him “cracking up” – taking three months off work and suffering mood swings that he attempted to resolve by drinking. “It’s taken me nearly 30 years and I still haven’t fully recovered,” says Whalley, who has been awarded the BEM and MBE for services to mountain rescue.
“I still suffer flashbacks and wake up with bad dreams.”
There has been scant solace from the official investigation. Libyan national Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-megrahi remains the only person ever convicted of the bombing.
He died aged 60 in 2012 after being released early from his 27-year prison sentence on compassionate grounds and sent back to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. His family has launched numerous appeals to attempt to prove his innocence.
Togneri says it was the support of his own family that eventually helped him back from the brink. He realised his mental health was finally improving when the ninth anniversary of the disaster came and went without the familiar sense of creeping despair.
Others, meanwhile, have eventually been able to work through their trauma with the help of specialists.
Paul Rae worked for the chemical company ICI and was on a night shift when he heard what had happened – he sprinted home to his family and recalls bursting into tears as soon as he made it through the front door to see they were safe.
He subsequently joined the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and, over his 20-year career, has worked alongside several of the firefighters who fought Lockerbie’s multiple blazes for seven and-a-half hours.
“You can see there is something still there that they didn’t want to talk about,” the now 49-year-old says. “I believe to this day a lot of people haven’t spoken about what went on that night and what they have seen.”
Rae is a beneficiary of the Fire Fighters Charity, which The Daily
Telegraph is backing in its Christmas appeal. The charity operates three specialist rehabilitation centres around the country for serving and retired firefighters and their families, including one in Penrith, a few miles from Lockerbie.
“I can’t talk highly enough of what they do,” Rae says. “I know people who have gone there and it’s changed the whole way they deal with things.”
For the town itself the events of that night remain ingrained in memory.
When David Murdoch returned to school there was an empty chair in the classroom. It belonged to 10-year-old Joanne Flannigan who was killed alongside her parents when part of the fuselage smashed into their bungalow. Her two brothers who survived have since died: one through drug addiction and the other through suicide.
In the living room of her farmhouse overlooking the town, David’s mother, Marion, admits the aftershocks of Lockerbie will never truly cease.
“People still ask, when they find you where you are from,” she says. The stigma never really goes away.”
‘It’s taken nearly 30 years and I still suffer flashbacks and wake up with bad dreams’