Sixteen hours before my daughter Flora was killed on the Lockerbie flight in 1988, the airside of Heathrow was broken into, close to where the bomb was loaded the following evening. Security was immediately informed by its own night watchman but did nothing effective to discover who had broken in, nor why. That was before the official "war on terror", but at a time when the airport had just been warned of increased terrorist risk to US aircraft. Medicine has its single golden hour in which to save life. Heathrow wasted 16 hours. The Scots then amplified the time delay. Told about the break-in by the Met police a month after the atrocity, their police and crown office kept it hidden from the court which tried the Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, more than a decade later, until after he'd been convicted. Surely these days we could have immediate central security warning of perimeter breaches, with automatic "lock down" of the airport including all outgoing flights, till the cause is discovered (Gunmen pull off £30m diamond heist at airport, 20 February)?
Jim Swire
Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire
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