The former head of the Italian government accused France and the United States on Saturday of being responsible for the Ustica plane crash that killed 81 people on June 27, 1980, and of doing everything possible to prevent the truth from coming out. AFP.

Carabiners secure the wreckage of a McDonnell Douglas DC-9Photo: Cola Images / imago stock&people / Profimedia

More than forty years after the events, the families of the victims are still demanding justice and the disclosure of the truth in this case, which has been fixed in the collective memory of Italians and is considered one of the biggest air disasters in the history of the country.

On the evening of June 27, 1980, Itavia Flight 870, flying from Bologna to Palermo, crashed into the Tyrrhenian Sea near the island of Ustica with 81 people on board, killing all passengers and crew.

The thesis put forward by several Italian experts is that the tragedy occurred when one or two Libyan planes, pursued by American and French fighter jets, followed the route of a civilian plane to avoid their radars.

Once in this “wartime scenario”, the McDonnell Douglas DC 9 would have been shot down by mistake or collided with one of the MiGs present in the area.

In an interview published on Saturday by La Repubblica daily, former Prime Minister Giuliano Amato (1992-1993) reiterates this thesis, saying that France, with the help of Washington, tried to eliminate Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, believing that he was in one Migs.

“The most likely version is that the French air force was responsible for the complicity of the Americans” “with the intention” of killing Gaddafi, he said.

The discovery of the corpse of a Libyan MiG-23 in the mountains of Calabria (southern Italy) on July 18, 1980 also fueled this hypothesis.

According to Amato, Bettino Craxi, then national secretary of the Socialist Party of Italy, allegedly close to Colonel Gaddafi, would have warned him if he had entered Italian airspace.

In 2003, Colonel Gaddafi accused the Americans of trying to kill him. Paris and Washington have always denied the involvement of their planes in this tragedy.

Giuliano Amato is now asking French President Emmanuel Macron to “wash away the shame that has hung over France” by either “proving that this thesis is unfounded or, if it is confirmed, by offering the most sincere apologies to Italy and the families of the victims.”