The world had watched with sadness the Lockerbie night of 21st December 1988 and its effects upon the relatives of the dead. As the media frenzy slowly calmed, TV documentaries appeared from time to time, and a tall white haired country doctor was seen as the spokesman for the British relatives. Events moved seemingly inevitably towards a trial of two accused Libyans. Yet without his efforts and those of his close friends, especially Professor Robert Black QC of Edinburgh University, that trial might never have come to pass.
Jim Swire transformed those first months of mourning for the loss of a beloved daughter into a challenge to the leaders of three continents. Along the way this gentle man would attract a host of enemies and a galaxy of friends. He raised once again the problem faced by man since history began, that of the interplay between a nation's government and the questioning mind.
He is amongst the most informed about the Lockerbie tragedy, having been intimately involved from the night of the bombing. He visited the United States, the United Nations, Germany, Libya and a number of Arab countries and key cities throughout the United Kingdom in his investigations of the event. He continued to research the subject long after the media lost interest, studying each nuance of the words used by the prosecution and the defence. Apart from those in the court itself, he is one of very few to have heard and studied all the evidence presented at the trial, totalling 12,000 pages of transcript. He is among a growing number convinced that the full story of Lockerbie has not yet been revealed.
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