Authorities found 84 more bodies Saturday from the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 as this grief-stricken little village tried to keep Christmas from being erased from its calendar.
Police Chief John Boyd said there would be no scaling down of the search until the bodies of all 258 people aboard the Boeing 747 and those who died on the ground are located.Helicopters and more than 600 people searched miles of Scottish countryside for victims of Wednesday night's crash, which showered this quiet town with flames and shards of jagged metal.
Among the dead is the CIA's station chief in Beirut, Lebanon, U.S. officials said Saturday.
In the town of 2,500 people, shops remained open and churches held Christmas Eve services, but the heart had gone out of the holiday. The Rev. Patrick Keegans of the town's Roman Catholic Church, whose own home was destroyed in the crash, put Christmas preparations aside Saturday to meet with relatives of the victims at a counseling center in the parish hall.
Police spokesman Angus Kennedy said Saturday night that 84 more bodies were recovered after the search area was expanded, bringing the total to 239.
None of the bodies has been positively identified, and Kennedy said it was a "fair question" whether all the remaining bodies will ever be found.
Six local residents listed as missing have been located alive and one other has been confirmed as dead, Kennedy said. That leaves 10 townspeople still listed as missing.
He said police also believed the occupants of only two cars destroyed in the explosion were missing, since what was thought to have been a third car was merely a license plate already in the road when the disaster occurred.
Officials earlier had not accounted for occupants of two other cars caught in the inferno, but said Saturday that one driver had been treated for injuries and the other already was on the list of the missing.
Searchers extended their hunt to more than 30 miles east of Lockerbie. Papers, clothing, money and mail from the plane had been found as far away as the Northumberland coast, 70 miles east of the main crash site.
Investigators were examining the flight's cockpit recording, which ended with what they called a brief, mysterious "faint noise."
Suspicions of sabotage were prompted by the inexplicable sudden breakup of the plane at 31,000 feet, a claim of responsibility and disclosures that the U.S. government had been warned of a plot to bomb a Pan Am flight between Frankfurt, West Germany, and New York in December.
Passengers and luggage of Flight 103 originated on a Boeing 727 in Frankfurt and switched to a Boeing 747 in London. The plane was bound for New York when it crashed.
But British aviation authorities, who are leading the crash probe, say the cause still is unknown and there is no evidence to suggest a bomb blew up the plane.