Lessons from Pan Am 103 and the Tokyo SubwaySUMMARY: Terrorists were very active long before 9/11. This essay examines the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland and the March 1995 Tokyo subway gas attack. The results of these terrorist acts are investigated, who carried them out, how they were carried out and what can be done in the future to prevent similar incidents from happening again. On December 21, 1988 the world was shocked by a Boeing 747 Pan American Airlines flight from Heathrow Airport in London to New York City crashed in a fireball due to a bomb planted by a terrorist in the forward luggage compartment. After the explosion the plane proceeded to fragment into three different parts. The wings broke off separately, as did the main fuselage and first class/cockpit area. All 259 people on board, from twenty-one different countries, died, as did eleven people from the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, where the plane was shot down. the first investigative work was carried out at the scene which would then lead to identifying the causes of the accident and the perpetrators of the crime. More than a thousand police officers, over six hundred soldiers, undertakers from the Royal Air Force and teams of investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Transportation Safety Board, the US State Department, the Federal Aviation Agency, the Boeing Company and Pratt and Whitney. These people began surveying a land area seemingly too large to negotiate, 845 square miles. The US has also moved some of its highly sophisticated spy satellites over southern Scotland to provide investigative teams with high-resolution reconnaissance photographs of the area being searched. Investigators were able to figure out pretty quickly that what brought down Flight 103 was a bomb. as it had all the tell-tale signs, including no emergency or distress calls before the accident. The bomb had been hidden inside a Toshiba radio, which was placed inside a hard-sided Samsonite suitcase that had been designated as an unaccompanied bag. The suitcase had been transferred from an Air Malta feeder flight departing from Valletta. In June 1990, six months after the