Colin Firth will play grieving father in Lockerbie bombing drama

English actor Colin Firth will take on the role of a grieving father in an upcoming series about the Lockerbie bombing.

The Oscar winner will portray Dr Jim Swire who has long campaigned for justice for his daughter Flora Swire after she died when the Pan Am flight 103 was blown out of the skies above Scotland 35 years ago.

Firth will portray the English doctor as a man who “risks everything in memory of his daughter and the unflinching pursuit of truth and justice” in the Sky series.

The actor, 63, won an Academy Award and Bafta for playing George VI in The King’s Speech in 2010 and is known for Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually.

Along with his wife Jane, Dr Swire has spearheaded a call for a full inquiry into Lockerbie.

He told the BBC in December 2022 that he wanted a UN court set up, instead of the case being dealt with by the US or Scotland and has long wanted the evidence against the only man convicted of the attack to be reassessed.

Flora, a medical student who died on the eve of her 24th birthday, was one of hundreds of people killed when the flight from Heathrow to New York’s JFK airport exploded above the Dumfriesshire town of Lockerbie.

The explosion on December 21 1988 killed all 259 people on the plane, many of whom were Americans heading home for Christmas, as well as 11 people on the ground.

The Sky and Peacock show is based on the book The Lockerbie Bombing: A Father’s Search For Justice by Dr Swire and Peter Biddulph.

The five-part series Lockerbie will explore Dr Swire’s fight for action and being nominated as a spokesperson for the victims’ families through the UK Families Flight 103 group, and look at the disaster and its aftermath.

Scottish playwright David Harrower, known for the play Blackbird, is the lead writer and Otto Bathurst, who won a Bafta for BBC period crime drama Peaky Blinders is lead director.

It is a co-production between Carnival Films, which is part of Universal International Studios and Sky Studios.

The BBC and Netflix announced in July that they had commissioned World Productions to make a six-part drama about the Lockerbie bombing.

Novelist and screenwriter Jonathan Lee, who wrote High Dive, is lead writer and Michael Keillor, who worked on Line Of Duty, Roadkill and Chimerica, will direct.

Former Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was found guilty of 270 counts of murder by a panel of three Scottish judges, sitting at a special court in the Hague in 2001 and was imprisoned in Scotland.

He was controversially granted compassionate release in 2009 after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Al-Megrahi returned to Libya where he died in 2012.

His family, and some relatives of the bombing victims, believe he suffered a miscarriage of justice.

Appeals against his conviction have been rejected.

Libyan Abu Agila Masud is alleged to have helped make the bomb.

He is to go on trial in the US in May 2025 facing three charges which he denies.

Production of the Sky series Lockerbie will begin in early 2024.

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