World Dec. 22, 2008 - 06:15AM JST ( 9 )

LONDON —

Britain marked the 20th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing on Sunday, recalling the night a U.S.-bound jet was blown up over a quiet Scottish town, killing 270 people.

More than 150 people gathered for a wreath-laying ceremony at the cemetery in Lockerbie, which saw 259 passengers and crew killed and 11 more dead on the ground just before Christmas 1988 as flaming debris crushed homes.

Lockerbie had gone through “20 years of the deepest mourning and the experience of the greatest pain,” local clergyman Canon Michael Bands said at the ceremony, one of several low-key memorial events held in the town.

Relatives of those who were killed later attended a service in the chapel at London’s Heathrow Airport, from where Pan Am Flight 103 took off on the night of Dec 21, 1988, mostly carrying Americans home for Christmas.

A minute’s silence was held in Lockerbie and at Heathrow just after 7 p.m., to mark the exact time of the tragedy.

In the United States, ceremonies were organized in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia as well as Syracuse University in New York tate.

A total of 35 Syracuse students coming home after studying in London and Florence, Italy, were killed on board the flight.

Barely 40 minutes into the flight to New York, the Boeing 747 was ripped apart by a bomb in the luggage hold at an altitude of 9,400 meters, killing everyone on board.

Lockerbie residents recall the explosion turning the sky orange and wreckage, fuel and bodies raining down.

The town had unwittingly been caught up in international terror.

The tortuous investigation into the bombing eventually led to the jailing for 27 years of a former Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet Al-Megrahi.

He is serving his sentence in a Scottish prison and, now suffering from cancer, recently failed in an attempt to be released.

Al-Megrahi continues to protest his innocence and his second appeal against his conviction will be heard next year.

The bombing killed 180 Americans and plunged ties between Libya and the West into a chill which has only recently thawed.

Libya may have been welcomed back into the international fold, but some Lockerbie residents continue to be haunted by memories of the night the jet fell from the skies onto a town decked out in Christmas decorations.

One floral tribute left at the cemetery Sunday read: “Twenty years have passed since you all left us to become flying angels. Your souls and spirits will always be with each and everyone one of us.”

Retired police inspector George Stobbs, 74, described the scene on the day of the disaster as “the nearest thing to hell I ever want to see.”

After seeing news of the crash on television, he headed to nearby Sherwood Crescent, where the 11 Lockerbie residents perished.

“There was this great crater, a great mass of burning. The heat was intense. I saw an iron gate melting as if someone was putting a blow torch on to butter,” he said.

Maxwell Kerr, 72, remembers finding poignant reminders of the passengers.

“It was families going home at Christmas. We did find lots of Christmas presents lying scattered about. There was men, women, children and babies. It’s horrific when you think about it,” he said.

The link to Libya was uncovered by investigators who painstakingly traced material from the Samsonite suitcase in which the explosives were planted inside a radio-cassette player.

They found that the bomb had probably been placed on board a non-Pan Am flight in Frankfurt which connected with the doomed aircraft at Heathrow.

Flight 103 was late taking off—if it had been on schedule it would have been over the Atlantic when the bomb detonated, sparing the town of Lockerbie and probably leaving the plane’s remains at the bottom of the ocean.

Wire reports