One of the world’s worst terrorist atrocities led to an unlikely and moving love story, an STV documentary has revealed.

The remarkable union between a Lockerbie ambulance man and a grieving American mother is told in STV’s powerful account “The Lockerbie bomber: Sent Home to Die”.

George White was on duty at Lockerbie’s ambulance depot when a terrorist bomb blew a Pan Am jet apart in the skies above the Border’s town in December 1988. In his futile search for survivors George found the body of one of the 270 victims, US student Suzanne Miazga, lying outside the depot. Later, he planted a rose bush and erected a plaque on the site.

George contacted Suzanne’s grieving mother Anne Marie and over the years she made numerous trips to Scotland to visit the spot where her daughter’s body had fallen and meet the man who found her.

When George’s wife passed away the pair forged an even closer bond and today, more than two decades on from the disaster, George White and Anne Marie Miazga are in love and living together in New York.

Anne Marie tells the programme how she believes fate conspired to bring them together. “We love each other, yes we do” she says. “She (Suzanne) had no control over where her body fell but it was all meant to be. No other bodies fell where she fell. It was all meant to be.”

Narrated by Kaye Adams, one of the first reporters at the scene, the documentary charts the story of the disaster from that horrific night on 21 December 1988 through to the latest furore over the Scottish Government’s decision to release convicted terrorist  Abdelbaset Al Megrahi’s almost a year ago on compassionate grounds.

The programme features archive news footage and new interviews with relatives of the victims, Scottish and American detectives who led the Lockerbie investigation, cancer specialists who examined Megrahi prior to his release and Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill who defends his   controversial decision.

The Lockerbie Bomber: Sent Home to Diewill be shown on STV at 9pm on  Monday August 9.