The sister of a Lockerbie bombing victim has hit out at at Sky TV’s drama about the 1988 terrorist attack that claimed the lives of 270 people.
Catherine Swire, whose 24-year-old sister Flora was killed when Pan Am Flight 103 went down over Lockerbie 36 years ago, said: ‘My last private memories of Flora have been distorted in this series.
‘Most of the details about my own life regarding Flora have been altered, dramatically and publicly, to uphold one single campaign story. Personally, to me, this matters very much.’
Ms Swire spoke out against the dramatisation of the atrocity, Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, and of how she was portrayed.
Her father Dr Jim Swire’s book, The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search for Justice, has been adapted into the five-part series starring Colin Firth in his role, which aired on Sky on Thursday.
She added: ‘The series concerns my family. It is about the death of my sister and dramatises my own role.
‘This despite a formal request to Carnival Films – who made the drama – for me not to be played,’ Ms Swire wrote in The Telegraph yesterday.
Catherine Swire asked not to be portrayed in the Sky drama
Colin Firth as Dr Jim Swire walking amid plane debris in the TV drama
‘The series shows my family at the centre of a search for truth. That search has been, to put it quietly, a great deal more nuanced than the Sky drama suggests.
‘It was disturbing to see, in one part of the drama, the character playing my role speculate passionately about whether Iran was the source of the terror attack. That is not my voice.’
She made her comments in an article in The Daily Telegraph, prompted, she said by ‘the hope that some attempt is made to move on from incessant focus on the act of Flora’s killing, to the tragedy of her death and her need for rest.’
Ms Swire’s position was at odds with comments from her father, Dr Swire, a long time Lockerbie campaigner, who told the BBC yesterday that he was ‘astonished by the accuracy’ of the Sky drama.
Dr Swire said he and other bereaved families believe the Lockerbie bombing was an act of retaliation from Iran after their own Iran Air Airbus was shot down by US missile cruiser USS Vincennes in July 1988, killing 290 people.
‘Five months later, Lockerbie happened. The facts seem to point towards Iran’s having engaged with terrorist groups, the chief one being the PFLP-GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command),’ Dr Swire said.
Flora Swire, who was only 24 when she died in the Lockerbie bombing
Speaking about the new series, Dr Swire added: “I can only be astonished by the accuracy and the telling way in which all these people working together have produced so accurate a copy of what we’ve tried to do in our small way at one end of the scale, and where now we hope at the other end of the scale that a great country like America may come to look afresh at what happened in light of what the evidence actually shows.’
Dr Swire has long argued that the Libyan spy Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, who was jailed for life in 2001 after being convicted of 270 accounts of murder in the terror attack, was innocent, and that the real culprits have never been brought to justice.
But Ms Swire said: ‘I think we should question the pursuit of terrorist perpetrators 36 years after the event.
‘In my view, a series that represents someone “solving” a terrorist atrocity as if it is a whodunnit misses what is most critical about a terrorist act.
‘The communication of terror. One version of what happened – Carnival Film’s – becomes monolithically “true”.’
A Libyan suspect of the Lockerbie bombing, Abu Agila Masud, who is alleged to have helped make the bomb, is to go on trial in the US in May this year.
US families of the victims have voiced fears that the Sky series could ‘instil doubt’ in jurors ahead of the trial.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk