Europa Amato reveals that the Italian plane that crashed in 1980 was shot down by a French fighter that intended to kill Gaddafi

The plane that crashed into the sea on the Italian island of Ustica in 1980, with 81 people on board, was shot down by a French missile intended to kill the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, but which ended up hitting the DC -9 from the Itavia company, former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato said this Saturday.

“The most credible version is that of the responsibility of the French Air Force, with the complicity of the Americans and those who participated in the air war in our skies on the night of June 27,” Amato assures in an interview published this Saturday the newspaper Repubblica.

The Ustica tragedy, one of the greatest enigmas of Italian aviation, remains shrouded in mystery more than four decades later, because, although subsequent investigations indicated that it was shot down, the reasons were never revealed.

“The plan was to skin Gaddafi, who was flying in a MIG of his air force. And the plan was to simulate a NATO exercise, with many planes in action, in the course of which a missile would be fired at the Libyan leader: the exercise was a setup that would allow the attack to be passed off as an ‘involuntary accident’,” adds the two-time head of government and former president of the Constitutional Court.

However, things happened differently, since “Gaddafi was warned of the danger (by the late Italian socialist leader Bettino Craxi, he says) and did not board his plane. And the missile launched against the Libyan MIG ended up hitting the Itavia DC9 that sank with eighty-one innocents inside.

“The most accredited hypothesis is that this missile was launched by a French fighter from an aircraft carrier off the southern coast of Corsica or from the Solenzara military base, which was very busy that night,” he adds.

The president of the association of the victims’ relatives, Daria Bonfietti, assured that Amato’s words “are very important and a correct reconstruction of everything in the documents, which we have known for years.”

Now “I expect something from France and that the Italian government acts to be answered. It is not right that our allies treat us like this,” he added to the Ansa news agency.

Amato, a prestigious politician and jurist with a long career whose name has been considered to occupy the presidency of the Italian Republic, regrets in the interview that France and NATO have not “shed light” on what happened: “a crime for reasons of State”.

“After forty years, the innocent victims of Ustica have not received justice. Why continue hiding the truth? The time has come to shed light on a terrible state secret – or rather – a secret of States. The French president “(Emmanuel) Macron (…) could do it. And NATO, which has tenaciously hidden what happened in the Italian skies all these years, could do it.”

The former Minister of the Interior, Economy and Institutional Reforms also believes that the time has come for “whoever knows to speak: it would be of great merit to the families of the victims and to History” and asks Macron to take a step forward.

“I wonder why a young president like Macron, also oblivious to the tragedy of Ustica, does not want to eliminate the shame that weighs on France. And he can only eliminate it in two ways: by demonstrating that this thesis is unfounded or, once its validity has been proven validity, offering a deep apology to Italy and the families of the victims on behalf of its Government. Prolonged silence does not seem like a solution to me,” he says.

France stressed this Saturday that it had already given Italy all the information it had on the “tragedy” of the plane that crashed in 1980 near Sicily, in which its 81 occupants died, and that it will collaborate again with Rome, if it is asks, given the allegations of eventual French responsibility.

In a statement sent to EFE, the Foreign Department stated that “France has handed over the elements at its disposal every time it has been requested about this tragedy, particularly in the framework of the investigations led by the Italian Justice.” He adds that “of course we remain willing to work with Italy, if they ask for it.”