The aircraft involved in the accident is seen here in 1972. |
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| Occurrence summary | |
|---|---|
| Date | 27 June 1980 |
| Type | Unknown (shootdown by military interception action suspected) |
| Site | Tyrrhenian Sea near Ustica, Italy |
| Passengers | 77 |
| Crew | 4 |
| Injuries | 0 |
| Fatalities | 81(all) |
| Survivors | 0 |
| Aircraft type | McDonnell Douglas DC-9-15 |
| Operator | Aerolinee Itavia |
| Tail number | I-TIGI |
| Flight origin | Guglielmo Marconi Airport |
| Destination | Palermo International Airport |
Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870, also known in the Italian media as the Ustica Massacre ("Strage di Ustica"), was an Italian flight which crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea while en route from Bologna, Italy, to Palermo, Italy, in 1980. The crash has been attributed to either a terrorist bomb or to an air-to-air missile strike. It was a regularly scheduled flight from Guglielmo Marconi Airport in Bologna to Palermo International Airport in Palermo. The flight departed 2 hours late at 20:08 CET on 27 June 1980. At the controls of the McDonnell Douglas DC-9-15 that evening were Captain Domenico Gatti and First Officer Enzo Fontana.
The aircraft (registered I-TIGI), which left Guglielmo Marconi Airport bound for Palermo International Airport, crashed at 20:59 CET into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the island of Ustica about 130 km southwest of Naples. All 81 people on board were killed (2 flight crew members, 2 flight attendants, and 77 passengers).
Two Italian Air Force F-104s were scrambled at 21:00 CET from Grosseto Air Force Base to locate the accident area and to spot any survivors, but they failed because of bad visibility. In July 2006 the re-assembled fragments of the DC-9 aircraft were returned to Bologna from Pratica di Mare Air Force Base near Rome. On 23 June 2008, Italy announced that they have reopened the case of Flight 870.
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After years of investigations, no official explanation or final report has been provided by the Italian government. In 1989 the Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism, headed by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino, issued an official statement concerning the disappearance of Flight 870, which thus became known as the "Ustica Massacre" (Strage di Ustica).
The definitive sentence asserted:
The perpetrators of the crime remain unidentified. The court, unable to proceed further, declared the case archived.
In June 2008, Rome prosecutors reopened the investigation into the crash after former Italian President Francesco Cossiga said that the aircraft had been shot down by French warplanes.[1]
On July 7, 2008 a claim for damages was served to the French President.
The role of Italian Air Force personnel in the tragedy is unclear. Several of them have been investigated and brought to court for a number of offenses, including falsification of documents, perjury, abuse of office, and aiding and abetting. Four generals were charged with high treason, on the allegations that they obstructed government investigation of the accident by withholding information about air traffic at the time of Ustica disaster.
The first ruling, April 30, 2004, pronounced two of the generals, Corrado Melillo and Zeno Tascio, not guilty of high treason. Lesser charges against a number of other military personnel were also dropped. The abuse of office charge was no longer valid, due to some changes in legislation, and the other allegations could not be pursued further due to the statute of limitations, as the events in question had occurred more than 15 years prior.
For this same reason, action could not be taken against the other two generals, Lamberto Bartolucci and Franco Ferri. However, the ruling did not acquit them, and they were still alleged to be guilty of treason. Dissatisfied, they appealed, and in 2005 the appeals court ruled that the accusations were made on insufficient grounds. On January 10, 2007, the Italian Court of Cassation upheld this ruling and conclusively closed the case, fully acquitting Bartolucci and Ferri of any wrongdoing.
In June 2010, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano urged all Italian authorities to cooperate in the investigation of the incident.[2]
In September 2011 the Palermo civil tribunal ordered the Italian government to pay 100 million euros ($137 million) in civil damages to the relatives of the victims for failure to protect the flight and for concealing the truth and destroying evidence.[3][4]
Speculation at the time and in the years since has been fueled in part by media reports, military officials statements, and ATC recordings, including radar images and trails of debris; particularly, trails of objects moving at high speeds.
After the series of bombings which hit Italy in the 1970s, a terrorist act was quite naturally the first to be proposed. It must be considered that the flight was delayed outbound from Bologna by almost three hours, so apparently the timer would have been set to actually cause an explosion at Palermo airport, or on a further flight of the same plane.
This involves NATO forces accidentally downing the DC-9 during an international exercise involving Italian, U.S., and French jet fighters. Aviation Week and Space Technology reported that damage had been found consistent with a continuous-rod warhead, which would have had to have come from an anti-aircraft missile.
Major sources in the Italian media have alleged over the years that the aircraft was shot down during a dog fight involving Libyan, U.S., French and Italian Air Force fighters in an assassination attempt by NATO members on an important Libyan politician, maybe even the leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, who was flying in the same airspace that evening. Gaddafi denied being in the area of the accident that evening. This version was supported in particular by investigative magistrate Rosario Priore in 1999.[5] Judge Priore said in his concluding report that his investigation had been deliberately obstructed by the Italian military and members of the secret service, in compliance with NATO requests.[5]
The media also reported that radar monitoring records released in 1997 by NATO showed that at least seven fighter aircraft were in the vicinity when the jet plunged into the sea off the island of Ustica. According to these sources, the radar shows that one or two Libyan MiG-23 had tried to evade detection by flying close to the airliner. Three Italian Air Force F-104S, one U.S. Navy A-7 Corsair II and a French fighter pursued the Libyan MiG-23 and a battle ensued.
On July 18, 1980, 21 days after the crash, a Libyan MiG-23 crashed on the Sila Mountains in Castelsilano, Calabria, southern Italy, according to eye witnesses and official reports. Media rumors reported that the plane may actually only have been discovered at that time, and that the pilot's body was decomposed; this gave rise to allegations that the MiG-23 may have been shot down at the time of the Flight 870 incident.[6]
According to the Italian media, documents from the archives of the Libyan secret service passed on to Human Rights Watch after the fall of Tripoli, show that Flight 870 and the Libyan MIG were attacked by two French jets.[4]
There are conspiracy theories surrounding this event, based on the series of events that followed the air crash. For example, the vessel that carried out the search for debris on the ocean floor was French, but only US officials had access to the aircraft parts they found. Several radar reports were erased and several Italian generals were indicted 20 years later for obstruction of justice. The difficulty the investigators and the victims' relatives had in receiving complete, reliable information on the Ustica disaster has been popularly described as un muro di gomma (literally, a rubber wall), because investigations just seemed to "bounce back".
Some of the Italian Air Force officials who might have known about the disaster's background died suddenly.[7]
In Bologna on June 27, 2007 the Museum for the Memory of Ustica was opened. The museum is in possession of parts of the plane, which are assembled and on display. Almost all of the external fuselage of the plane was reconstructed. In the museum there are also objects belonging to those on board that were found in the sea near the plane. Christian Boltanski was commissioned to produce a site specific installation. The installation consists of:
Each loudspeaker describes a simple thought/worry (e.g. "when I arrive I will go to the sea") All the objects found are contained in a wooden box covered with a black plastic skin. A small book with the photos of all objects and various information is available to the visitor upon request.
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