Pan Am Flight 103 was 31,000 feet in the air, heading for New York City, when it exploded over Scotland on the longest night of the year, December 21, 1988, killing 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground below. It was the world’s deadliest act of air terrorism until the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, according to the FBI. American and British investigators painstakingly pieced together the aircraft’s wreckage and found it had been destroyed by a bomb, which they accused Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi and another man of planting
