In the FBI field office in Washington, D.C., two pictures hung on the wall: one of the tail of the Pan Am Flight 103 aircraft, which donned an American flag, and the other of a baby’s shoe.

The images inspired FBI investigators to find justice for the innocent lives lost in the 1988 bombing.

Richard Marquise, a retired FBI agent and leader of the task force investigating the bombing, said the recent death of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the only person convicted for the tragedy, is not significant to the investigation because he was not talking.

‘The reality is the investigators, those that are still involved in the investigation, are going to have to pursue other avenues, which was always going to be the case,’ he said.

Al-Megrahi’s death Sunday also did not bring closure for community members and the families of the 35 Syracuse University students on Pan Am Flight 103. The students were returning from semester study abroad programs in London and Florence, Italy, in December of 1988 and were killed over Lockerbie, Scotland. The bombing killed 270 people altogether.

Many members of the SU community feel justice has not been served and continue to search for answers.

At first, Eileen Monetti, mother of victim Rick, could not believe what the reporter from her local CBS affiliate was telling her when she picked up the phone Sunday.

‘My first reaction was ‘Are you sure?” Monetti said. ‘I was kind of skeptical.’

Al-Megrahi had been sentenced to life in prison but was released Aug. 20, 2009, on compassionate grounds after serving eight years of his sentence. A doctor diagnosed him with terminal prostate cancer and said he had only three months to live. Al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence official, lived nearly three years after he was released.

‘When they allowed him to go free was probably the second worst day of my life, the first being when we found out Rick was dead,’ Monetti said. ‘I never thought that the Scots would release him.’

She believes that others, including former Libyan dictator Moammar al Gadhafi, were involved in the bombing, and so al-Megrahi’s death felt ‘anticlimactic.’

After discussing it with her daughter, Monetti said she realized al-Megrahi himself was only a distraction to the ongoing investigation into the bombing and that his death could now open the possibility to uncovering new information and evidence.

Jeannine Boulanger, mother of victim Nicole, said that when she heard the news of al-Megrahi’s death, she didn’t think much of it either.

‘I have long decided that Mr. Megrahi’s fate, any moment consumed thinking about him and what he did, would really not do justice to my daughter, and it would take away every moment of my life that she did not get,’ she said.

But when she thinks about the circumstances of al-Megrahi’s death, with him being at his home and out of prison, she calls it an ‘atrocity of justice.’ Friends and family surrounded al-Megrahi while Boulanger’s daughter died in a tragedy in a foreign country without her loved ones, she said.

Frank Duggan, president of Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 Inc., said the group hopes more evidence will be found implicating others in the bombing. But even if this information is found, he said he is not sure what will come of it so many years later.

The new Libyan government has been very cooperative with the ongoing investigation, Duggan said. But he raised concerns that there are other, more recent issues that will likely be addressed first.

‘They are so busy trying to straighten out the rest of the legal atrocities that took place in the 40-year reign of Gadhafi that we’re probably pretty far down the line,’ Duggan said. ‘There were 25,000 people killed just in the six months of that revolt, and we’re talking about getting them to look at 270 people who were killed 24 years ago.’

Marquise, the retired FBI task force leader, is author of the book ‘Scotbom: Evidence and the Lockerbie Investigation.’ He said the FBI director and Lord Advocate of Scotland both recently traveled to Libya and spoke with the new government, which said it would cooperate.

But Marquise expressed concern about what documentation or evidence still exists.

SU honors the victims of Pan Am 103 every year during Remembrance Week. Judy O’Rourke, director of undergraduate studies and recording secretary for the Pan Am 103 victims group, said she does not feel al-Megrahi’s death will affect Remembrance Week in any way.

‘The next step is to continue what we have been doing, which is to honor all of those who were killed on Pan Am 103 by remembering them, but also, to me, one of the most important aspects of SU’s remembrance is to think about how each of us can have a positive impact in the future,’ she said.

Ivan Bakin, a senior international relations major and one of the 35 Remembrance Scholars for the 2012-13 academic year, said al-Megrahi’s death will likely be brought up in the panels and discussions among faculty and Remembrance Scholars. But honoring the students who lost their lives is more important and will be the focus, he said.

When Boulanger, the mother of Nicole, went to visit the memorial for the students killed on Pan Am 103, her daughter’s friend returned a book she lent him. The book was ‘Living, Loving and Learning’ by Leo Buscaglia. He told her there was an underlined passage she might find upsetting.

The passage read, ‘If you should ever hear that Buscaglia blew up in the sky, don’t you dare shed a tear. He did it with enthusiasm.’

‘I think it is that challenge that all of us who have lost loved ones on that flight live with every day, and that is to make every moment count since we don’t have any assurances of the next,’ Boulanger said. ‘That would be the best tribute we could give to those we lost.’

cffabris@syr.edu

Published on May 24, 2012 at 12:00 pm

Contact Casey: cffabris@syr.edu | @caseyfabris