HUNDREDS gathered in Washington yesterday around a cairn built with 270 Scottish stones - one for every victim of the Lockerbie bombing.
HUNDREDS gathered in Washington yesterday around a cairn built with 270 Scottish stones - one for every victim of the Lockerbie bombing.
The service took place at Arlington National Cemetery in front of around 500 people.
The stones were donated by the Lockerbie community and placed in the cemetery inscribed with the names of each victim.
Among those gathered as prayers were said and the names of the fallen read out were Peter Lowenstein and Kathleen Flynn.
Their children remain frozen in time as students returning home for Christmas with an expectant future in front of them. "There are times when it seems like five or 10 years, other times 30 to 40 years," Mr Lowenstein told the New York Daily News.
His son, Alexander, a student at Syracuse University in New York State, would be 41 now.
The university lost 35 of its students in the bombing and held its own memorial service yesterday. The university has forged strong links with the small Scots town in the years following the tragedy and now runs a scholarship for Lockerbie pupils to study in the US.
Of the atrocity itself, Mr Lowenstein added: "It's never far from our minds, it never goes away."
Ms Flynn lost her son, 21-year-old John Patrick "JP", who was also studying abroad through Syracuse. She said: "The beauty of our message was to immediately take a proactive stance. We demanded the investigation continue to get the perpetrators. We worked hard to maintain the memory of our loved ones."
Ms Flynn, who took her children and grandchildren to the memorial service, added: "We go to Arlington every year. It's a very moving celebration of the sacrifice that was made."
Mr Lowenstein said his family would normally have commemorated the day in an upbeat way by taking their three grandchildren to a Broadway play and talking about Alex's sense of humour, but decided to go to Arlington for this year's milestone anniversary.
Undergraduate studies director Judy O'Rourke was at Syracuse when news first arrived of the tragedy 20 years ago. "We found out at Syracuse that the plane was missing - that was the first word we had - in mid-afternoon on December 21," she told BBC Online.
"In the days before cellphones and e-mails were so prevalent, trying to find information about what had happened was extremely difficult.
"And it became more so as time went on because Pan Am and our State Department were so inundated with calls and unable to answer almost any question."
Slowly, the dreadful details began to emerge. "It became clear by mid-evening that there were no survivors of this awful tragedy," she added.
The incident was initially treated as a tragic accident and the decision was also taken to open the on-campus chapel as a place for people to "be together".
"A tragedy of this magnitude we had no precedent for," added Ms O'Rourke.
The majority of students who died had been studying in London.
"The average age of the people on that plane was around 26 - it was just a very young group of people," said Ms O'Rourke.
"There was almost no-one on campus who wasn't touched by some of these people who died.
"Most everyone knew someone who was on the plane."
The university now awards 35 annual Remembrance Scholarships in recognition of academic achievement and community involvement.
There is also the Syracuse Lockerbie Scholarship, where two students from Lockerbie Academy study in Syracuse each year. Ms O'Rourke added: "The first feelings that I really have are for all of those people on that plane. We are missing the contribution they could have made and that's sad, it really is - it is unfair.
"But on the more positive side we have 600 Remembrance Scholars and nearly 40 Lockerbie scholars, young people who have very personally witnessed through the work they have done what this event meant to so many people."
The ceremonies in the US also gave Americans time to pause on the past as well as reflect on their country's ongoing war on terror.
Brian Duffy, managing editor of National Public Radio, who covered the events in 1988, told the radio station: "This was a horrific wake-up call and I know from having spent time with the families of the victims that even now, 20 years on, this is something they live with daily."
Mr Duffy said it was a "very different order of business than the kind of sophisticated coordinated attack we saw on 9/11,", referring to the 2001 atrocity that killed nearly 3000.
