Following Wednesday’s rejection of the appeal of the convicted bomber in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, several of the families who lost loved ones in the attack said they felt relieved but not content.

The decision was reached by a Scottish five-judge panel, after the the lawyers for Ali Al Megrahi attempted to convince the court that his original conviction was a miscarriage of justice. Megrahi will now serve a minimum of 20 years in a Scottish prison.

“Just because the trial is over and we have the satisfaction that Megrahi is behind bars we are not going to give up, that is for sure,” said Joan Dater, who lost her daughter Gretchen in the explosion.

Gretchen attended SU and was on her way back from a semester in London along with 34 other students studying through SU’s abroad program when a bomb exploded in the cargo area that forced the plane to smash into the small Scottish town of Lockerbie. A total of 270 people died in the attack.

Dater said she will never experience closure to the events that happened 13 years ago. Complicating matters further is her involvement with a civil suit against the government of Libya, who Megrahi was working for as an intelligence agent, as well as Megrahi’s own possible release in 2019. She also said the families will continue to fight for tougher airline security and terrorist tracking, two areas that are also of interest to the families of victims in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. She said several families affected by Sept. 11 were present at a meeting held by Pan Am 103 victims’ families in Washington, D.C., to discuss coordinating efforts on both fronts.

Joann Hartunian’s daughter Lynn also died in the air disaster. She was a student at the State University of New York College at Oswego traveling to London through SU’s DIPA program. Hartunian said the conviction is only the first step to discovering who was really behind the attack.

“I hope that a civil trial can bring to light the role that the Libyan government had in the attacks,” Hartunian said.

‘(The decision) doesn’t really satisfy most of us,” she said. “We don’t think this low-level intelligence officer brought down a 747 by himself.”

Hartunian said the legal ramifications do not completely help the victims’ families deal with the deaths.

‘All of us feel the void in our lives and nothing that happens in a courtroom can change that,” she said.

The civil trial, which was announced last year after the original conviction, said the Libyan government was directly responsible for intentional murder and is seeking $10 billion in damages to be divided between all the families involved.

Bob Monetti, whose son Ricky died in the attack, said that although the civil trial should have more success in uncovering damning evidence it will still be taxing on the families who have just been through a two-year criminal trial.

“The civil trial is just heating up,’ he said.

Monetti’s wife Eileen was present for the reading of the ruling and called him with the results.

‘I heard at five in the morning and I went back to sleep,” he said. “It was relieving because I wasn’t sleeping a whole lot before that.’

Monetti said that although this week’s ruling is by no means the end of the fight, it did bring some comfort.

‘The criminal trial is at an end,” he said. “Amen.”

Asst. News Editor Jeff Adelson contributed to this report.

Published on March 18, 2002 at 12:00 pm