Jim Swire Bio

Flora's grave
 Born within the walls of Windsor Castle and lived much of his early life in Bermuda and the Isle of Skye. After an education at Eton and Cambridge he took a degree in medicine at the University of Birmingham, later becoming a general practitioner in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire.


Nelson Mandela and the Swires
 As the media frenzy slowly calmed, TV documentaries appeared from time to time, and a tall, white-haired country doctor became spokesman for the British relatives. Events moved seemingly inevitably towards the trial of two accused Libyans. Yet without his efforts and those of his close friends, notably Professor Robert Black QC of Edinburgh University, that trial might never have come to pass.

First meeting with Gaddafi
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 mankind since history began, that of the interplay between a nation's government and the questioning mind.


He is among 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 in the United Kingdom in his investigation 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 defence lawyers. Apart from those in the court itself, he is one of very few who have studied all the evidence presented at 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.