The shooting dead of Muammar Gaddafi, the tyrant who ruled Libya with an iron fist for 42 years, means there may never be answers to some of the mysteries surrounding the Lockerbie bombing atrocity of 1988. But it won’t deter former Bromsgrove doctor Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was one of the 270 victims, in his quest for the truth and justice. It is a search which has brought him into contact with agents and informants and led to an extraordinary meeting with Gaddafi himself. MAUREEN MESSENT reports.

IN THE hours of the first news of the Lockerbie murders, some relatives flocked to the town in vain hope of finding loved ones as survivors. None were.

“I chose not to go immediately,” said Dr Swire.

“I left it for a day or so, but, when I did arrive, I found bodies and body parts in the mortuary that had been an old ice rink.

“I made myself known to the pathologist there and saw that Flora was almost intact but smelt of formaldehydes, a terrible denial of youth.

“This pathologist chap asked me if there was anything he could do and I asked for a lock of her hair and a look at her feet. She’d been born with a mole on one toe and I just wanted, in some crazed way, to make sure it was Flora.

“I was lucky to find her almost intact. Many victims had been reduced to powder in the aerial explosion and impact.

“The only thing I could think of as I stood there is that Flight 103 would have flown over Skye, where the ashes are now buried at the feet of my parents grave in a lonely little Episcopalian churchyard which my parents, before they died, had renovated with walls and a gate.

“The church itself is in ruins. Flora is with her grandparents.”

Other Midlands victims on the ill-fated flight 103 who died included Clare Dacciochi, aged 19, from Tamworth, and her fiance Clayton Flick, aged 25, from Coventry, 19-year-old nanny Helga Mosey, from Oldbury, and Birmingham-born Otine Gordon, aged 25.

Throughout my five-hour interview with Dr Swire the point he made early was that Flora and others who lost their lives above Lockerbie or in the town as the result of impact, fire or falling debris, were murder victims.

Never once does he speak of them “being killed” at Lockerbie or “dying” in the atrocity.

Always they are, in Dr Swire’s words, murder victims. The word is chilling: Even more now we know the truth behind it.

Most chilling of all were the strangers, all burly men, who appeared in the town soon after the tragedy. Nobody knew whence they’d come. Nor was it known who was responsible for the helicopters hovering over Lockerbie within hours and for hours. Dr Swire, who at that time knew nothing of this unexplained man and air power, had been handed his first clue, although he didn’t realise it.

Hindsight is always luxurious. The questions posed in the first hours after Flight 103 plunged, broken-nosed, to earth should have alerted the Dumfriesshire and Galloway police – the smallest force in Britain – that all wasn’t quite as it seemed.

Most noticeable was that the crime scene, scattered over a huge area, was compromised, not by locals and local police searching frantically for survivors, but by men (some wearing FBI badges, some unidentified) who appeared from nowhere. Overhead, helicopters hovered: these too had no local connection. Police were too busy to ask questions. A few hours later, though, came the first puzzle of many to bedevil the entire Lockerbie disaster. When luggage was married up with the dead, it was found that an American army major’s suitcase had had a hole cut from its side long after impact.