Can we forgive terrorists?

EN: Tell us about your background.

JM: I was born in Coventry. I worked in the technical publications department of Sir W.G. Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft Ltd.

I became a Christian through the American evangelist Billy Graham being relayed from Harringay in London to the Methodist Central Hall in Coventry. I decided that this was what I was seeking and that I needed to repent of my sinful nature and receive God’s forgiveness through Christ.

At the age of 23 I left my job and, after two years at Bible College, went into pastoral ministry. Supported by my wife Lisa I have pastored churches in Humberside, North Devon, the Black Country and Derbyshire.

The terrible news

EN: What happened on the day that your daughter died in the Lockerbie bombing?

JM: We will never forget that Christmas. For us Christmas 1988 has become the watershed which separates all the events and memories of our lives.

Looking back, the first emotion I remember as I turned on the TV at 9.00 pm on December 21 was one of sympathy. Sympathy for the passengers and crew of the crashed airliner and sympathy for the people of the small Scottish town of Lockerbie on which it had fallen. My 16-year-old son, Marcus, sat on the sofa while Lisa, my wife, perched on the arm. I stood beside her. ‘The poor people!’ I remember someone saying. Then they began to give details. ‘Pan Am flight 103, flying from London to New York, has exploded above the Scottish borders at about three minutes past seven’.

‘That’s Helga’s flight!’ burst from Lisa’s lips. Even though I had checked her luggage in at the Pan Am desk only a few hours earlier, the possibility of such a thing happening to her just hadn’t crossed my mind. These things happen to others; we are normally observers of other people’s tragedies. You can imagine the stunned silence which followed as the unthinkable slowly expanded, filling not only our minds but every nerve and cell of our bodies.

‘No! No! No! No!’ broke the silence as Marcus screamed at the screen. ‘Helga, Helga, Helga’, quietly, almost silently, managed to escape from somewhere deep down inside my wife. Later, she said that the one time her little girl had needed her most, she wasn’t there. I stood as if dumb; my tongue unable to articulate at all. The news flash ended and the world moved on to other, seemingly trivial, matters.

Forgiveness?

EN: You decided to forgive. How did the Lord help you to do that?

JM: By day two there were already rumours that a terrorist bomb might have been the cause of the disaster and some of the relatives were howling for blood. When one early interviewer asked how we felt about it we said that we readily forgave whoever was responsible. ‘How can you forgive animals like that?’ was the interviewer’s response. While I was trying to formulate a reply, Lisa cut in. ‘Well, sir, Jesus said that if we don’t forgive those who hurt us God will not forgive us. We are also sinners and are trusting God for forgiveness through the blood of Jesus Christ. Sir, we just dare not play such foolish games as not forgiving.’

I was still wondering at my wife’s answer when he shot another question at me. ‘Has this not destroyed your faith?’ ‘Well’, I said, ‘this is where we prove whether what we have preached and said we believed for most of our lives is real, or whether it is just a game’. During the past years we have found the grace and love of God and the strength that he gives to be more real than we had ever dared believe. We have known ‘the peace of God that passes understanding’.

It wasn’t until five days after the disaster that I was able to begin to properly formulate my strategy for surviving this dreadful blow to our family. Of course, I didn’t think of it in those terms then. At five o’clock in the morning I sat at Helga’s desk in her room at the top of our house. Nothing could alter the dreadful facts. The cry for revenge was already being heard from some of the relatives of victims. Certainly the guilty parties should be brought to justice to deter others of similar mind. However, I simply could not seek personal revenge against those who had so cruelly murdered our lovely 19-year-old daughter. I said, ‘Lord, I can’t be like that’. I saw that if we seek revenge against our enemies we reduce ourselves to their level and make ourselves no better than the terrorists. ‘No’, I thought, ‘our anger must be directed, not against the small fry who plant bombs, but against the arch-terrorist, the force behind all the world’s evils, Satan himself’.

But how could I strike back against such a one? My mind went to Paul’s Letter to the Romans 12.21: ‘Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil by doing good’. This has become the basis of our strategy. It makes Satan hopping mad because it glorifies God. Jesus said, ‘...that men may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven’.

Who was responsible?

EN: You attended the trials. What is your take on who is responsible for the bombing?

JM: Yes, I rented an apartment in Zeist in Holland where the trial was held under Scottish law.

The ten-month-long trial raised more questions than it answered. I went with a fairly open mind as to the outcome for the two Libyans accused, but came away 85-90% convinced of the innocence of Megrahi, the one who was found guilty. Even if he was totally guilty I felt very strongly that, on the evidence in that court, his guilt was not shown to be ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, which is the legal requirement. The three judges even said in their 83-page written judgment that ‘. . . the identity of the accused is not absolute’.

I came away more convinced than ever that our original conviction that this was the work of a Palestinian group based in Syria and financed by Iran was still the most likely.

EN: You have been in contact with Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi by letter. Do you want to tell us anything about that?

JM: During the trial I spoke frequently in my very limited and faltering Arabic with Mr. Megrahi’s family. Whatever his guilt or otherwise, they were going through a very difficult time. While he was in prison in Scotland I wrote to him on a number of occasions and, through the good offices of the Libyan Charge d’Affaires in Glasgow, we had two telephone conversations. I told him that I didn’t think he was guilty, but that even if he was — and only he and God (and perhaps another) knew the truth — as far as my family was concerned, he was forgiven. He wanted me to visit him but the authorities would not allow it.

Since his repatriation I have written to him and tried to point him to the path to secure his eternal future.

EN: How can we pray for you and the other relatives of the victims?

JM: The most important thing to pray for is that the truth will come out. This would bring more help to all than anything else. Mr. Megrahi’s repatriation has given us another opportunity to press our government for an independent inquiry into all matters surrounding the disaster. The trial, and any subsequent police investigations, can only have a very narrow remit, i.e. Who did it? Our concerns are far wider and more important than that. We want to hold those we elect to govern and protect us to account. The big questions are centred around, ‘Why was it allowed to happen?’ when they had at least 14 warnings and a photograph of the bomb. One warning, a telephone call to the US embassy in Helsinki, even told them (events proving it to be absolutely accurate) that the bomb would be in a Toshiba radio cassette player, on a Pan Am flight, between Frankfurt and New York via London, and gave a time window of two weeks.

These warnings were ignored by all except that the US embassy in Moscow posted a notice on their bulletin board warning their staff not to fly with Pan Am during that Christmas period. No one told the public!

John Mosey talks about the Lockerbie tragedy