On the 28th Anniversary of the Lockerbie Bombing, Newton Remembers One of Its Own

NEWTON, MA – Twenty-eight years ago today, a bomb exploded on Pan Am Flight 103 as it passed over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew onboard and 11 residents of the small Scottish town.

While the victims of the attack were mourned around the world, the pain was very real in Newton. Sarah Philipps, a 20-year-old Syracuse University student who had graduated from Newton North High School just a few years prior, was one of 35 students returning from a semester abroad in London.

The City of Newton remembers Sarah with a memorial near the Newton Centre Playground, across from one dedicated to the memory of those killed on September 11th.

Sarah's ashes are buried in the Garden of Remembrance in Lockerbie. A 2011 article on Syracuse.com detailed her family's annual pilgrimage to the town to add stones from home to their own personal memorial on a hill high above Lockerbie.

In 2000, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, both Libyan nationals, were charged in the attack. Megrahi was convicted of 270 counts of murder the following year and sentenced to life in prison; Fhiman was found not guilty.

Megrahi was found to have prostate cancer and granted a compassionate release in 2009, a controversial decision that outraged some families of the victims. He died in Libya three years later.

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