The Bombing of Pan Am 103 Lockerbie drama tells stories which haven't been heard before, says boss

He said: "I read the pilot, I think it was in 2021. And I thought I knew a reasonable amount about the Lockerbie story, and realised reading just the first script, and then Adam [Morane-Griffiths, executive producer]'s brilliant research document, that I didn't.

"There was an awful lot more to this story. There were voices that hadn't been heard, there were stories that hadn't been told. There was a whole scale of investigation that had been overlooked, and it felt like it was a story that needed to be told and a drama that needed to be seen."

The series features an ensemble cast led by Connor Swindells and Patrick J Adams, and follows a number of real-life figures whose stories have been dramatised, including their characters police officer Ed McCusker and FBI special agent Dick Marquise.

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Heath also spoke about why the project needed to be a collaboration between so many partners, saying: "There was a challenge of finding the home for the project.

"I knew the BBC had had a number of Lockerbie projects in development over the last 20 years, and so what I was banking on was that they would have the same response as me, which ‘This is a unique angle. These are stories that haven't been told.’

"And fortunately, when Gaynor Holmes at BBC Scotland read the script, she felt the same way. And it felt like a script that went through the BBC very, very quickly. Everyone read it, recognised the importance of the story, recognised that the timing was right, that the angle on the story was right, and that it's something that should get made.

"So we got the BBC on board, and then the scale of this kind of drama needs big resources. It needs international backing. It can't just be UK. And fortunately, I knew the team at Netflix very well, Anne Mensah, Mona Qureshi, Manda Levin, and they all responded really quickly to the story as well, and came on board as our partners.

"It's a pretty unique collaboration between MGM, BBC, Netflix and us [World Productions], but it's needed that scale of production to bring it to the screen."

The Lockerbie bombing, which saw a plane en route from Heathrow to JFK being bombed, was the worst ever terror attack on British soil and the first major act of terrorism against US citizens, and left 270 people dead.

The series follows the story of the Scots-US investigation into the attack and the devastating effect it had on the small town and the families who lost loved ones.

The Bombing of Pan Am 103 premieres on BBC One and iPlayer on Sunday 18th May, with new episodes premiering at 9pm every Sunday and Monday for three weeks.

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