On December 21, 1988 Pan Am flight 103 bound for John F. Kennedy Airport exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 passengers on the flight died along with 11 people on the ground. 176 of the passengers were Americans. 36 of them were from Syracuse University. It was the largest terrorist attack to date on Americans.
After months of investigation the trail of guilt led to Libya and the command of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. However, Libya and Gaddafi did not concede guilt until 2003. The terrorist responsible for the act, Abdelbaset Mohmed Ali al-Megrahi was convicted of murder by a panel of three Scottish judges and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001. He was held for 8 and a half years, only to be released in 2009 to be with his family as part of Scotland’s law of compassionate grounds in the event that a convicted prisoner is in such poor health that natural death is imminent. 3 years later Al-Megrahi is still alive and free.
One of the passengers on flight 103 was 21-year-old Alexander Lowenstein also a student of Syracuse University and the son of Suse and Peter (pictured in the photo above). Alexander’s mother Suse is a lifelong artist and sculptor who found a way to grieve through the act of creating her work. Over a period of several months Suse met with mothers who had also lost loved ones on flight 103 in the quiet space of her studio to relive the moment when the shattering news entered their lives and changed them forever. Suse photographed the women as they experienced the physical memory of the tears and screams. She then used those images as the basis for the forms she would then create on a large scale from plaster. The final result is called “Dark Elegy” a large-scale installation and memorial to the attack on Pan Am flight 103 and to all acts of terror. The installation is currently open to the public on her property in Montauk, New York, but will soon be cast in bronze and moved to a more accessible public space.
This photo was taken after Gaddafi was killed this past October by NLA fighters in Libya.