Pan Am Flight 103-Minute by Minute

Just before Christmas in 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Scotland, killing the 259 passengers and crew members on their way from London to New York and 11 people on the ground.

After years of negotiations and sanctions, Libya agreed to extradite the two suspects, on condition that they be tried in a third country. So a Scottish court convened in the Netherlands, and the suspects were extradited more than 10 years after the Boeing 747 was bombed. In 2009, despite strenuous American opposition, the Scottish government ordered the release of the bombing planner, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, on compassionate grounds and permitted him to return home after serving 8 years of his 27-year minimum sentence for murdering 270 people. He qualified for compassionate release after medical evidence showed he would die within months of prostate cancer