With Muammar Gaddafi now dead and the so-called Lockerbie bomber dying from prostate cancer in Libya, it might seem that a former Bromsgrove doctor’s quest to find the truth over the murder of his daughter and 269 others who died when Flight 103 exploded has collapsed. But Jim Swire remains as resolute as ever. Maureen Messent talks to him in the first of three special reports.

THERE was this doctor in Bromsgrove back in the 70s and 80s, a lankily lean man, thick greying hair unruly as an overblown chrysanthemum, who loped into what locals called the Recreation Road practice.

Dr Jim Swire was known in the town as a gently sympathetic doctor who’d fall behind patients’ appointment lists because he believed that encouraging them to talk was a necessary part of all therapy.

All doctors glean many family secrets: but the families who trusted Dr Jim knew little of his background.

They’d never have guessed, for instance, that he was born at Windsor castle. That he was educated at Eton – yet knew the horrors of rising on freezing mornings on the Isle of Skye to pick early snowdrops with his sister, then drive them to Portree for the mainland ferry on their journey’s first leg to Covent Gardens – Skye snowdrops had to compete with Isles of Scilly blooms.

That few knew his background sprang from Jim Swire’s innate shyness; he finds difficulty of speaking of himself and his thoughts. Even today, when his face – thinner than in his Bromsgrove days, hair still mad but white now – has become synonymous with all bereaved by terrorism – he remains an intensely private man, so it’s easy to forget that his quest to unravel the Lockerbie enigma have led him into mortal danger three times. He risked kidnap in Libya as he forged a close a friendship with Gaddafi as is possible with an unpredictable psychopath.

At which stage he thought to himself: “Oh God, he looks like Mick Jagger.”

Dr Jim became a hero for a while, often speaking for the British families who lost relatives in and over Lockerbie on Wednesday, December 21, 1988 – just as offices closed for Christmas and taxis were at a premium as the merry made their way home.

The fate of Pan Am’s Flight 103 shook the world, the worst air atrocity then on record. The lives of victims’ families changed for ever but none more than Jim Swire’s. All for love of his 24-year-old daughter Flora, who lost her life and for his belief that the truth must always out.

Five years after Lockerbie he told me: “First and foremost I’m a doctor. Whenever a patient dies, I expect to be able to sit down and explain exactly why death occurred. That’s the last courtesy I can offer the bereaved.

“But no satisfactory explanation has ever been given to those of us who lost loved ones over Lockerbie – or, indeed, who the 11 of Lockerbie’s townspeople who died that night.

“I’m unshakable in my belief that this horror could have been prevented and that the powers-that-be have obstructed us in finding this out. I’m not saying the grief will be easier to live with when we know the full story. Loss, after all, is loss. I am saying that we must fight for our moral right to know at whose hands our loved ones died.”

Since he spoke those words he and lawyers around the world have discovered exactly why Lockerbie’s victims died. What they haven’t as yet achieved is to prove many facts in court. Much evidence, now widely accepted, was either deliberately withheld or overlooked.

But Dr Swire’s passion to broadcast the truth to everybody is as strong as ever in 2011.

There is a risk in describing Jim Swire’s years of fighting for the truth of flight 103 as an “international thriller” because the words seem to belittle both the dead and Dr Swire.