The Ustica massacre evokes personal memories. On the evening of June 27, 1980 we were in Cagliari with the ships of the XNUMXst Naval Division of the Marina Militare Italian; on the CT Audace we went to sleep with the cruiser A. Doria at our side: in the morning he was gone. “An airliner crashed, the Doria went to bring help”, this was the news that made us aware of what would become one of the many Italian mysteries.
It is said that Italy has no secrets: it only has many mysteries. The Ustica massacre is one of these. The DC9 of the Itavia Bologna - Palermo flight at 20.59 on 27 June 1980 disappeared from the radar screens of the air traffic control and abruptly cut off communications. 81 lives burned in an instant without a certainty having emerged since then. Collision, structural failure, internal bomb, attack with weapons from the outside: these were the hypotheses on which the technicians in charge of finding the truth immediately questioned themselves. The first three causes were also excluded following the recovery of the bodies of the victims found at sea and of the wreck that took place in the years 1987-91 on depths of over 3000 meters. There remains the trail of the attack brought from the outside. The questions that remain unanswered are: by whom? against who ? The mystery is dense. A blanket of misdirection covered the whole affair. Pages of the radar registers of Marsala, Licola and Poggio Ballone removed, testimonies of the air traffic control operators full of 'I don't remember'. Unfortunately, we must also speak of some suspicious deaths among the said operators. A dark plot worthy of the most perverse military espionage fiction. In the following years some rumors put forward 'theories that have only confused the ideas. In 1992 the journalist Nino Tilotta in L'Ora published "Air battle then the tragedy" in which he describes a scenario of US-Libya war. In 1994 the former agent of the Mossad Victor Ostrovsky in the book "The other side of deception" changed the scheme by presenting it as an Israeli-Libya clash. In 2007, the president emeritus Cossiga affirmed that it was the French fighters that hit the Itavia flight in the act of attacking a Libyan plane. At this point, the fact that Libya was the object of an aggression that ended in tragedy for the Italian DC9 seems to remain consolidated.
The judicial investigations
With such a deployment of political - military cover-ups, the judiciary could not do much to arrive at a truth about the Ustica massacre. In 1999 there was the 'no place to proceed' towards those responsible. A trial, which began in 2000, to hit the red herrings ended with the acquittal of the accused. The only ruling by the Courts in favor of the victims was the sentence, more than 30 years after the fact, which condemned the Ministry of Transport and Defense to pay compensation to the victims' families. A civil ruling that admitted that the plane crashed due to a violation of the safety of the skies charged to the defendant ministries.
It was 1980: a few weeks later a Libyan military plane fell on the Sila, a little more than a month later the railway station exploded in Bologna. Few secrets, many mysteries.
