On 21 December 1988 Libya bombed Pan Am Flight 103 , which exploded in mid-air and crashed on the town of Lockerbie in Scotland after a bomb detonated , killing all 259 people aboard , and 11 people in Lockerbie . Iran was initially thought to have been responsible for the bombing in revenge for the downing of Iran Air flight 655 by the American missile cruiser USS '' Vincennes '' over the Persian Gulf , but in 1991 two Libyans were charged , one of whom was convicted of the crime in a controversial judgement on 31 January 2001 . The Libyan Government accepted responsibility for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing on 29 May 2002 , and offered $ 2.7 billion to compensate the families of the 270 victims . The convicted Libyan , Abdelbaset al-Megrahi , who was suffering from terminal prostate cancer , was released in August 2009 by the Scottish Government on compassionate grounds . He died in 2012 . In May 2014 a group of relatives of the Lockerbie victims continued to campaign for al-Megrahi 's name to be cleared by reopening the case
downing of Iran Air flight 655
Iran Air Flight 655
1986 United States bombing of Libya