A rocky outpost of Italy in the Tyrrhenian Sea, the island of Ustica owes its name to the smouldering volcanic lava that gave its striking rock formations their dark hue. For many Italians, however, the picturesque island is synonymous with a notorious plane crash that claimed 81 lives, and the intricate cover-up that buried its causes in a thick fog of lies, decoys and mysterious deaths. The fate of Itavia Flight 870, which plunged into waters off Ustica on June 27, 1980, remains a subject of fierce debate after countless expert reports and judicial enquiries spanning several decades.
The most widely accepted theory suggests the plane was caught up in an aerial dogfight and mistakenly shot down by a fighter jet, which a former Italian president has claimed was French. News this week that French authorities would hand over defence documents to Italian investigators has been greeted as a potential gamechanger in Italy, where prosecutors and plaintiffs have long accused France and other Western allies of withholding evidence. The 11th-hour twist led prosecutors on Wednesday to abort plans to shelve the latest investigation into the crash, throwing a lifeline to families of the victims who have relentlessly lobbied Italian governments and the judiciary to pursue the case.
The DC-9 plane operated by the now-defunct Itavia carrier was in the final stretch of its journey from Bologna to Palermo on a clear summer evening when it suddenly broke up and crashed into the sea, killing all 77 passengers and 4 crew members, all of them Italian. The incident is known in Italy as the _strage di Ustica_, a term commonly used to refer to the deadly terrorist attacks that rattled the country in those years, many of which also remain shrouded in mystery. Watch moreVictims of Italy’s deadly ‘Years of Lead’ demand justice “At first, it was labelled an ‘accident’ or a ‘tragedy’.
But as efforts to cover up the incident became apparent over time, people started calling it a ‘_strage_’ (massacre),” said historian Cora Ranci, who has written a book about the Ustica affair and the many smokescreens she says have hampered investigations. Like other unsolved civilian massacres, she added, the Ustica affair “has contributed to the erosion of trust between citizens and institutions in Italy, fuelling the sense that those in power are bound by a code of silence and that their actions are shrouded in secrecy”. The reconstructed wreckage and other recovered items lie in a hangar near Rome in December 2003. © Emiliano Grillotti, AP Following the crash, officials hastily concluded that it had been caused by mechanical failure, precipitating the demise of the already struggling carrier Itavia.
Judicial inquiries resumed only years later under pressure from victims’ families, spurred by an investigative journalist convinced that the plane had been shot down. Progress was slow, hampered by the fact that that tracking data and radar scans had been wiped clean at all but one of the various Italian bases within range of the incident, leaving investigators with little hard evidence to work on. Four air force generals were tried on charges of treason and withholding evidence, though none were convicted.
The untimely deaths of at least 15 military personnel and others connected to the case – through transport accidents, shootings, stabbings and suicides by hanging – furthered muddied the waters, compounding the sense of a conspiracy to hide the truth. In 2013, Italy’s highest court ruled that the plane had been brought down in an aerial battle, either by a missile or through a near-collision, without identifying a culprit. It ordered the state to compensate families of the victims, adding that cover-ups in the investigations were considered “definitively ascertained”.
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