Farmers found Dad’s body still strapped in to his seat... We’ll never forget how they kept watch over him

30 YEARS ON

THE family of a Lockerbie victim huddle close as they gaze across the quiet field where he died in Britain’s worst terrorist attack 30 years ago.

Back then, this wreckage-littered landscape six miles outside the Scottish town bore witness to the horrifying bombing of Pan-Am Flight 103 in the skies above.

Now, in their pastoral peacefulness, these fields tell the story of a remarkable transatlantic friendship that blossomed from a terrifying nightmare.

Tragic banker Frank Ciulla’s daughter Laurie, mum of three of his grandchildren, said: “This is a place that offers us comfort – and such a special bond with the couple who found him.”

In December 1988, Frank’s family were tormented by grief as it became clear he had perished along with 258 other passengers and crew in the explosion as he travelled home to the US for Christmas on the night of the 21st.

They feared he must have died horrifically in the appalling devastation of the main fuselage crash site in Lockerbie where most of the passengers were found. But while they wept, tortured by their imagination of what had happened to 45-year-old Frank, thousands of miles away astonished farmers Margaret and Hugh Connell had discovered him six miles from the town in one of their fields – still strapped to his seat, 11B, and almost unmarked.

The couple then kept watch over his body for 24 hours and even asked rescue teams if they could take him into their home, away from the biting cold.

MOVING

Ever since, they have tenderly called him ‘Our Boy’.

It was three years before Frank’s widow Mary Lou and her family discovered the Connells’ moving vigil when they received a phone call in 1991 from another family whose loved one was also found on the farmland. Laurie, 49, says: