Lockerbie: A Search for Truth has such a made-for-TV sensibility that it can be difficult to believe much of what it depicts really happened. But the crusade of Jim Swire in the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing is very real, and the true story, as is often the case, is as dramatic and twisty as the dramatized version.
Peacock’s five-part miniseries, adapted from the 2021 nonfiction book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, co-written by Dr. Jim Swire and Peter Biddulph, recounts Swire’s decades-long investigation into what remains the worst terrorist attack ever committed on U.K. soil. Yes, given the limited screen time, it has no choice but to cut some corners and condense events into their most dramatic and easily-filmable forms, but the vast majority of what it depicts really happened, in much the same way as it’s presented in the show.
The Pan Am 103 Bombing and the Death of Flora Swire
Three days before Christmas in 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 departed from London’s Heathrow Airport with a bomb in its cargo hold. It detonated 38 minutes into the flight and blew the plane to pieces above the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 259 passengers and 16 aircrew, and 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground.
Flora Swire, Jim Swire’s daughter, was aboard the plane, on her way to spend Christmas with her boyfriend in New York. The explosion went off just after 7 pm local time, ripping a hole in the fuselage, and causing rapid decompression. The combined forces ripped the plane apart and sent pieces of the fuselage rocketing to the ground at 500mph, many of them landing in residential areas.
The first episode of Lockerbie: A Search for Truth depicts this tragedy in a visceral and alarming way, but it perhaps doesn’t quite highlight its sheer magnitude. The resulting wreckage was broken into millions of pieces and spread over almost 800 square miles. Within that haystack, a few needles emerged, including clothing hiding a tiny piece of circuit board from the bomb’s timer, and fragments of the Samsonite case it had been hidden in. These would ultimately become instrumental in the charging of two Libyan-born suspects, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah.
Remains of the nose of Pan Am 103 | ROY LETKEY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Who Was Jim Swire?
Herbert Swire, better known as Jim, was a general practitioner from Windsor, Berkshire, who soon after the Lockerbie bombing became a spokesperson for U.K. Families Flight 103, a support group for the bereaved families of the victims. He would go on to deliberately antagonize the British government over its lax airline security protocols and negligence prior to the attack, which was forewarned twice but kept secret from the general public. He proved instrumental in bringing about the landmark trial of al-Megrahi and Fhimah in a Scottish court on neutral ground in the Netherlands and then advocated for the release of al-Megrahi after he was sentenced to 270 counts of murder.
Swire’s appeal is that he was a largely normal – if very clever and determined – man who was driven to extremes by his grief and the burgeoning belief that he was witnessing a cover-up, and then a deliberate scapegoating of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya. He’s played by Colin Firth in Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, and it’s his perspective that the series is couched in, despite there being many other important ones.
Swire is still alive as of 2025 and is 88 years of age. He has lost none of his determination to prove what happened in the Lockerbie bombing but has perhaps resigned himself to the idea that the truth may never be known.
Did Swire Really Take A Bomb Through Customs?
In the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing, the British and U.S. governments claimed to have radically overhauled airport security procedures. Swire wasn’t convinced by this, and on May 18, 1990, he tested his theory by taking a homemade explosive device on a flight from Heathrow to JFK, and then another from JFK to Boston.
This is depicted in Lockerbie: A Search for Truth and strikes one as a possible embellishment, but that’s not the case. This really did happen. Swire built his bomb at home and filled it with Marzipan instead of Semtex, so it wasn’t liable to explode, but he was nonetheless able to pass through three airports entirely unmolested.
In the show, this is perhaps the first indication of Swire taking his crusade too far. He makes national news for the stunt and earns the attention of the government, and his family begins to suspect that he might be taking too many risks. As it happens, this is not the riskiest thing that Swire would end up doing in search of justice.
Jim Swire, who still maintains that we were lied to about the Lockerboe bombing | Image via BBC
Did Jim Swire Really Meet General Gaddafi?
A particularly big deal is made in the show of Jim Swire’s meetings with General Muammar Gaddafi, who at the time was in charge of Libya and was considered a dangerous dictator with a profound hatred of the West. When the suspects in the Lockerbie bombing were named as Libyan, the assumption was that, in the absence of any extradition treaties, Gaddafi would not allow them to stand trial in Scotland.
Gaddafi did offer to prosecute the two men in Libya, but this was rejected. In the show, Swire meets with Gaddafi in person – surrounded by his twitchy all-female personal guard – to convince him. This did indeed happen in real life, though it was part of a wider tour that Swire made of Libya, Egypt, the United States, and several cities throughout the United Kingdom to advocate for an idea posited by Professor Robert Black of Edinburgh University to try the suspects under Scots law in a neutral country.
Lockerbie: A Search for Truth trims a good amount of this out, so it does seem more like Swire is personally responsible for talking Gaddafi into accepting the idea to bolster his public image. The Libyan government would eventually take full responsibility for the bombing – though did not confess to having it sanctioned in the first place – and paid $2.16 billion in combined restitution to the victims’ families.
Swire Still Doesn’t Believe al-Megrahi Was Guilty
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was found guilty during the trial, which ended up taking place at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, and was sentenced to 270 counts of murder. Fhimah was found not guilty.
However, as depicted at the end of Episode 3 of Lockerbie: A Search for Truth and then in the final two chapters, Swire did not – and still does not – believe al-Megrahi was guilty. Throughout the trial, it becomes obvious that the evidence against him is circumstantial and that his conviction hinges on details and testimonies that are ambiguous at best or known to be false at worst. A significant one in the show is the Maltese shopkeeper who claims to have recognized al-Megrahi when he bought the clothing the bomb was wrapped in. In the show, it is subsequently revealed that he was paid by the Americans to change his testimony.
In reality, there was significantly more hazy evidence that Swire was unconvinced by, though the shopkeeper’s testimony was certainly part of it. After his conviction, Swire lobbied on behalf of al-Megrahi, pushing for the Scottish Criminal Case Review Commission to look again at the sentencing. The first appeal was unsuccessful and the second was abandoned. Al-Megrahi was eventually released in 2009 on compassionate grounds – he had prostatic cancer and died three years later.
Swire still maintains the innocence of al-Megrahi and the Libyan government. The authorities and several other family members of the victims, however, do not.
