Prosecutors in Rome have sent formal requests for judicial assistance to the US, France, Belgium and Germany with regard to the investigation into the Ustica air crash of 27th June 1980, reports ANSA.
The crash, also known in Italy as the Strage di Ustica [Ustica Massacre] killed eighty-one people – seventy-seven passengers and four crew – when the plane plunged into the sea off the island of Ustica.
Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 had left Bologna Airport two hours late that evening and was bound for Palermo. If, as one international team of air crash investigators concluded after examining the wreckage, there was a bomb on board, the late departure is significant, for the timer would have been set to cause an explosion when the plane landed at Palermo. This was the Red Brigade terrorist era in Italy and later that same year a bomb killed 85 people and wounded more than 200 at Bologna Station.
However, a second international team of investigators concluded that then plane was struck by a missile and subsequent prosecutors have said that they have found evidence that flight tracks and radar scans had been tampered with. The theories are that either the plane was caught up in a NATO training exercise or in a military operation.
Several Italian Air Force personnel have been investigated on charges of withholding information, perjury, abuse of office and falsifying documents but no conclusions have been reached. Two Air Force generals were found not guilty of high treason – withholding information from government – in 2004 and another two were cleared in 2005.
The case was reopened after former President Francesco Cossiga said, in 2008, that he thought the plane had been hit by a French missile by mistake. He did not say why he had waited so long to make this statement.
Conspiracy theorists abound and some have pointed to a high mortality rate in Air Force personnel linked to the crash.
