Fifteen years after the plane sunk to the ground with 259 people aboard – after hundreds of lawyers, thousands of meetings and untold broken promises – families of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 are finally seeing the threads of justice come together.

About 35 family members of victims from 1998’s Pan Am Flight 103 disaster met in Newark, N.J., Saturday to discuss their loved ones, their recent settlement with the Libyan government and what, as a group, they should do next.

As the legal phase of the Pan Am Flight 103 tragedy comes to an end, families are still struggling through their grief, finding new ways to honor the memory of their lost relatives and fighting to ensure the kind of terrorism that marred their lives doesn’t do the same to others.

Each family will receive $5 million within the next few weeks as a result of last Friday’s lifting of United Nations sanctions against Libya, but little of the meeting was spent discussing money. Rather, the focus fell on the organization’s extra-legal efforts: fighting for better security and planning ways to honor the victims in the future.

One major step the victims of Pan Am 103 are taking is the development of more stringent security regulations for airports around the world.

Rutgers Professor Bill Mayo spoke about his currently classified project to develop a bomb detector for U.S. airports. He was critical of the political infrastructure in the United States, claiming that it takes disastrous events like the bombing of Pan Am 103 or the attacks of Sept. 11 for government to be concerned about what he characterized as gaping security holes in US airports.

‘There are things that we can do and we’re sitting on it,’ Mayo said. ‘There are very few people doing this work, and it’s really sad.’

He added that the government has spent no money on research to solve the problems presented by current airport security apparatus, which are inadequate and could lead to another attack.

Published on September 21, 2003 at 12:00 pm