Friday 25 April 2014

Jim Sheridan plans Pan Am terror attack film

[This is the headline over a report published yesterday on the website of The Hollywood Reporter.  It reads as follows:]

Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan is lining up a movie about the 1988 Pan Am terrorist bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, which left 270 passengers and town residents dead.

Sheridan said he is working on a script with Irish screenwriter Audrey O’Reilly and that the film would "definitely happen in the next few years."

The attack continues to occupy hearts and minds on both sides of the Atlantic, as many of the dead were American and British.

"It’s a drama basically looking at the effect on a family of terrorism,” said Sheridan.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaker said that the narrative is set to follow the real-life story of Jim Swire, an English doctor whose daughter Flora was among the dead when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over the Scottish village on its way from London to the US.

Swire soon became a leading campaigner in the hunt to discover the truth about the terror attack and was unconvinced by the trial and the accusations leveled at Libya.

Eventually the doctor would go on to meet Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the alleged Libyan intelligence officer who was jailed for the bombing, as a working medic.

Megrahi was released by the Scottish authorities on compassionate grounds to return to Libya to die in 2012 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

"It was this weird thing where you think you’ve found the person who killed your daughter, and then Jim ended up in the cell looking after him -- because he’s a doctor and the guy wasn’t well -- and it’s obvious as the nose on your face that Megrahi didn’t do it," said Sheridan.

Lockerbie recently returned to the headlines with a report in UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph claiming that the bombing was actually carried out by a Syria-based terror group under orders from Iran.

Abolghassem Mesbahi, a former Iranian intelligence officer who's since defected to Germany, claimed that the plane was downed in response to a US Navy strike just six months earlier on an Iranian commercial jet that killed 290 people.

"It’s scary what they didn’t reveal to us at the time," said Sheridan. "It doesn’t really matter, the people are dead and you can’t bring them back to life. But in the future, we need clear investigations of these things or else you’re going to end up with flight MH370 [the missing Malaysia Airlines plane]."

Swire is scheduled to be among the special guests at Sheridan’s inaugural Dublin Arabic Film Festival, which kicks off in the Irish capital’s Light House Cinema on May 8.

Other speakers at the four-day event are set to include Omar Sharif, who opens the festival with his acclaimed 2003 drama Monsieur Ibrahim, and Hany Abu-Assad, the director of Oscar-nominated Palestinian dramas Omar and Paradise Now.

Sheridan's 1989 debut, My Left Foot, garnered Oscars for Daniel Day-Lewis and co-star Brenda Fricker.

Sheridan followed up with In the Name of the Father, which won the Golden Bear at the 44th Berlin International Film Festival, and his resume also includes The Boxer, In America, Get Rich or Die Tryin' and Brothers.

[A further report on the same website can be read here.]

1 comment:

  1. Officially, the U.S. Defence intelligence agency is the US government. The US State Department, lawyers and special interests have pointed elsewhere as they have a corruption problem. Jack Straw did all he could to block appeals and flew to see his friend, the new president of Iran. Shell is the number 1 oil producer in Iran.

    Frank Duggan refused to recognize the US government OFFICIAL conclusion for whatever reason.

    The Sunday Times
    From The Sunday Times
    August 16, 2009.......................................5 days before the Libyan was released.. 2 DIA agents were killed in the bombing
    US blamed Iran for Lockerbie bomb
    Jason Allardyce and Mark Macaskill

    American intelligence documents blaming Iran for the Lockerbie bombing would have been produced in court if the Libyan convicted of Britain’s worst terrorist attack had not dropped his appeal.
    Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence officer expected to be freed this week, had instructed his lawyers to produce US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) cables implicating the so-called “rogue state”.

    The memo suggests Iran was behind the attack on Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people in 1988, in response to the shooting down of an Iranian commercial airliner by the USS Vincennes, an American warship, five months earlier.
    One document the defence team had planned to produce was a memo from the DIA dated September 24, 1989. It states: “The bombing of the Pan Am flight was conceived, authorised and financed by Ali-Akbar Mohtashemi-Pur, Iran’s former interior minister.

    “The execution of the operation was contracted to Ahmad [Jibril], Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) leader, for a sum of $1m (£600,700).

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