plane crash

In this Monday’s Mirror Daily Digest, we’ve pulled together the biggest stories of the day from Romeo Beckham’s ex speaking out on the famous family feud to one Brit dad’s life-saving flight change and fallout from yesterday’s Soccer Aid

Welcome to the Mirror’s Daily Digest, where we pull together all the best stories of the day from our News, Showbiz, Sport teams and more. This Monday, we’re featuring everything from another development in the Beckham family feud to one dad’s lucky escape from the doomed Air India flight and Soccer Aid drama hitting social media.

This afternoon, Romeo Beckham’s ex girlfriend Kim Turnbull has broken ranks to speak out about the Brooklyn feud that has tormented the family. Elsewhere, a dad has spoken out after a last minute flight change saved his life and Paddy McGuiness has hit out at Carlos Tevez after the Soccer Aid star scored four goals past the TV icon last night.

Romeo Beckham’s ex Kim Turnbull breaks silence on Brooklyn feud and ‘scapegoat’ lies

As the Beckham feud drags on, our showbiz team spotted that Romeo Beckham’s ex-girlfriend, Kim Turnbull, broke her silence on social media this afternoon after being dragged into the bitter family drama. Kim, 26, is said to be at the heart of the Beckham fallout in which eldest child Brooklyn and wife Nicola Peltz, 30, have become estranged.

The DJ is said to have dated Brooklyn before he met billionaire heiress Nicola. However, following weeks of headlines about her and Brooklyn, Kim fumed that she was ’embarrassed by the lies.’

This Monday, Kim took to social media to speak out for the first time on the drama. She said: “I’ve avoided speaking on this topic to prevent adding fuel to the fire, however it’s come to a point where I feel the need to address it so I can move on.”

Read the full story here.

Brit dad meant to be in Air India plane crash survivor’s Seat 11A breaks silence

This Monday, our News team covered one British dad’s lucky escape after a last minute flight change saved his life – he was due on the Air India flight 171 this week. The dad has shared his shock and expressed his gratitude after he changed his plans at the very last minute and has spoken of the very bizarre coincidence with his new booking.

Owen Jackson, 31, from Saffron Walden in Essex, had been in India on a work trip and was scheduled to fly back this week but had to decide between flying back on Thursday or Saturday. In the end his colleagues said to take the Saturday flight as the job would take a bit longer than originally planned.

He was then booked onto the same route on Saturday which would have been the same aircraft as the one which crashed, killing all but one of the 242 people onboard. In a bizarre coincidence, Owen was booked onto seat 11A for the Saturday flight – the seat number belonging to the only survivor of flight 171.

Read the full story here.

Paddy McGuinness hits out at Carlos Tevez ‘assault’ after Soccer Aid

Soccer Aid graced TV screens yesterday evening, raising over £15 million for UNICEF. However, drama over the hotly anticipated match has spilled in to today after former Manchester City ace Carlos Tevez fired four goals past England keeper Paddy McGuinness and fans accused him of forgetting Soccer Aid is for charity.

Paddy McGuinness has now broken his silence after being on the wrong end of the Carlos Tevez masterclass. Taking to Instagram today, Paddy shared a hilarious snap of him and Tevez post-match. Tevez had a huge grin on his face as he and Paddy pointed fingers at each other.

The funnyman wrote alongside it: “Police are looking to contact this man in connection with an assault that took place in the Old Trafford area of Manchester last night.” Viewers at home joked Tevez was approaching the game with the ferocity of a Champions League final.

Read the full story here.

Grooming gangs have ‘nowhere to hide’ Yvette Cooper vows as damning report published

This afternoon, our Politics team were in the Commons to listen to Yvette Cooper’s statement on grooming gangs. The Home Secretary said a “damning” report into grooming gangs found the UK has “lost more than a decade” in protecting children.

The Labour minister told MPs “vile” abusers will have “nowhere to hide” as she vowed to finally bring hundreds of evil predators to justice. She told the Commons the Government will bring in a string of new laws after Baroness Louise Casey unearthed chilling failures.

In a report published this afternoon, Baroness Casey called for a full national inquiry to highlight the harrowing abuse suffered by hundreds of children, and ensure it never happens again. Ms Cooper said: “We have lost more than a decade. That must end now.”

Read the full story here.

Brazen Prince Andrew heads to huge royal event despite King Charles ‘ban’

As Royals gathered for the annual Garter Day this Monday, Prince Andrew was spotted heading to Windsor Castle – despite not being expected to take part in its public procession. The disgraced Duke of York was seen in a shirt and tie driving his car towards the castle for the ancient Order of the Garter ceremony as the Royal Family‘s summer season began in earnest.

The day sees those in the order gather for lunch at the castle before a procession takes place through the castle grounds that sees members dressed in white plumed hats and dark blue velvet robes. Andrew is a member of the order alongside King Charles, Queen Camilla and Prince William and is believed to be joining the annual lunch and investiture, which takes place behind closed doors.

However, he was not expected to take part in the public procession through the castle grounds – having been banished from it for the past four years. Andrew stepped down from public life after the furore over his friendship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Read the full story here.

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Pyramiden, a town in the Arctic Circle that has stood empty of humans since 1998, is a living museum to Soviet life. Visit today and you will find cups left on the table, skiing equipment abandoned in the hallway and newspaper cuttings on the wall

An eerie ghost town has been left exactly as it was when crews abandoned it 27 years ago.

The Mary Celeste ship has been etched into the memories of school children for decades. The American merchant brigantine was discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores on December 4, 1872, with food still on plates as if the crew was about to sit down to dinner. The mystery surrounding the abandoned ship has captivated people for over 150 years, leading to numerous theories about the fate of its crew.

Far less well known is the story of Pyramiden, a town in the Arctic Circle that has stood empty of humans since 1998. Visit today and you will find cups left on the table, skiing equipment abandoned in the hallway and newspaper cuttings on the wall.

“Walking Pyramiden today gives you a glimpes into the Soviet-style nostalgia, outdoor as well as indoor. Best of all, its not an artificial scenery aimed for some kind of movie-production. This is real. The smell of papirosa, likely the strongest cigarette ever made, stains on the indoor walls. Hammer and Sickle ornaments and the Soviet star are used as decoration around the town,” the Barent Observer writes of Pyramiden.

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“In a remote room inside the Palace of Culture are a few empty bottles of the cheap domestic Rossiya- and Priviet vodka. A book with the transcripts from the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lays on a desk. That was the first congress presided over by Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Central Committee.”

There are few signs of life beyond the occasional hardy seabird, an Arctic fox or a polar bear looking for its next meal.

Unlike the Mary Celeste, there is no mystery around why the occupants of Pyramiden left in such a hurry. The Russian state-owned mining company Trust Arktikugol closed down Pyramiden’s mining operations in April 1998, following 53 years of continuous activity.

The end of the settlement neared as coal prices dwindled, difficulties with coal extraction from the mountain became more apparent, and 141 people tragically lost their lives in 1996 at Operafjellet. Miners and their families perished in the plane crash that had been ferrying them from Pyramiden to Barentsburg. Such was the scale of the tragedy and the impact it had on the town of 1,000 that its continued operation proved impossible.

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The town was first founded by Sweden in 1910 but was sold to the USSR 17 years later. From 1955 to 1998, up to nine million tonnes of coal were thought to have been pumped out of Pyramiden. Svalbard belongs to Norway under the Svalbard treaty, which allows citizens from all its member countries to become residents. The treaty reads: “All citizens and all companies of every nation under the treaty are allowed to become residents and to have access to Svalbard including the right to fish, hunt or undertake any kind of maritime, industrial, mining or trade activity.”

In its pomp, it boasted a theatre, studios for creative arts, and a library. The schools, 24-hour canteen, and sports complex are all gone. All that remains is a statue of former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, the northernmost monument to him in the world.

Today, the main thing occupying the ghost town now are the terrifying polar bears. However, six people operate as rifle-carrying warders in the summer. Despite the nearest settlement being some 31 miles away, dark tourism has been gently ticking along since 2013, but you can only access Pyramiden by boat or snowmobile for nine months of the year. One visitor to the town in 2018 wrote in Haaretz : “There are thousands of angry polar bears all around us.”

When Pan Am Flight 103 set off from Heathrow to New York, its passengers and crew were looking forward to returning home to celebrate Christmas – but tragically, they never made it

The Lockerbie bombing where 270 people sadly lost their lives is still the deadliest terror attack in the history of the UK, even though it took place more than 30 yeas ago. It was 21 December, 1988, when the Pan Am Flight 103 from Heathrow to New York exploded just 38 minutes into its flight while travelling over Lockerbie, with the wreckage of the plain raining down on the houses below.

And it wasn’t just the passengers who lost their lives – the small Scottish town lost 11 residents, including a family of four, Jack and Rosalind Somerville and their children, Paul, 12, and Lindsay, 10, who died when a section of the aircraft fell on their home in Sherwood Crescent.

In Lockerbie, residents opened their front doors to see 259 bodies dropping out of the sky, landing on the street in front of them. After the bomb exploded, everything went dark and eerily quiet in the town.

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The 243 passengers boarding their pre-Christmas flight at London Heathrow or via Frankfurt in Germany came from 21 countries and ranged in age from two months old to 82. Forty per cent of the 270 total victims were aged 25 or younger, many of them children, while two-thirds were American.

Of the 16 crew onboard the plane, called ‘Clipper Maid of the Seas’, some were returning home to spend the festive season with their families, while others were set to enjoy some last-minute Christmas shopping in New York. They included senior purser Mary Murphy, who hailed from Twickenham and had been flying for over 25 years, and junior purser Milutin Velimirovitch, who had kindly rearranged his schedule to help a friend.

The ill-fated plane heading for New York had landed at noon at London Heathrow that day from Los Angeles, parking at Gate K-14 before pushing back for its flight at 6.04pm and taking off from runway 27R at 6.25pm. Just after 7pm, an air traffic controller at the Scottish Air Traffic Control Centre tried to make contact with the plane to no avail, before a loud noise was heard on its cockpit voice recorder.

Bunty Galloway told The Guardian she had been watching TV just like any other night when she heard a strange noise and opened her front door to see two young women fall in front of her house, with the body of a child already lying at the foot of her steps.

The bomb had exploded at 7.03pm, when the plane was 31,000 ft above Lockerbie. Radar showed that eight minutes after the explosion, the plane’s wreckage had spread to one nautical mile, with a British Airways pilot flying from Glasgow to Carlisle contacting the Scottish authorities after seeing a huge fire on the ground.

Investigators later found signs of an explosion on one of the baggage containers from the forward hold. Scottish police and FBI agents would learn the bomb, containing 350 to 450 of Semtex, had been concealed in a Toshiba radio cassette player inside a brown Samsonite suitcase, which also contained various items of clothing purchased in Malta.

Records in Frankfurt suggested an unaccompanied bag had been routed from a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it had been loaded onto the feeder flight to London and onto the subsequent ill-fated flight to New York. After a painstaking investigation in 2001, Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was found guilty of 270 counts of murder in connection with the bombing and sentenced to life in prison. He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 and died from prostrate cancer in 2011, always denying his involvement in the bombing.

In December 2020, the US Attorney General announced new charges against Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, a former Libyan intelligence operative, for his role in the bombing, with a trial set to take place in Washington in May.

Lockerbie: A Search for Truth premieres on Sky and NOW today