Ustica massacre, 43 years later: the whole truth is still missing

The question about what happened on the night of 27 June 1980 in the sky above Italy is still an open question. It’s the night of Ustica massacre. Also in 2023 the Association of Relatives of the Victims is engaged on the one hand in the constant request to Judiciary to conclude the investigations, reopened in 2008 after President Cossiga had attributed responsibility for the tragedy to France, and to indicate the culprits, on the other hand to keep the memory alive by drawing on the most varied expressions of contemporary artistic languages.

For years Daria Bonfietti he repeats it remembering that night. «The government of my country, Italy, must ask other countries what they were doing that night in our skies. It is clear to everyone: what is not known is why it was unspeakable for these countries. We know the truth about the massacre. We know that in Italy” on 27 June 1980 “a civil plane was shot down in peacetime, this is the truth, we still don’t know by whom it was shot down, but we will know when our country will have the strength to ask for answers Friendly and allied countries that still don’t tell us”.

It’s the night she lost her brother who was among the 81 people on board the DC-9 Itavia Bologna-Palermo shot down in the skies over Ustica on the night of June 27, 1980. Forty years have passed. The flight had departed two hours late from Bologna and was headed to Palermo. It was supposed to land 15 minutes after 21. However, radar traces were lost shortly before 9 that evening. A structural failure was said, a bomb on board, the trials over the years tell instead of a battle that night in the Italian skies. A reconstruction that has reached a final sentence, in Cassation.

The Memory Museum of Ustica houses what remains of that flight, the recovery dates back to 1987, together with a permanent installation of Christian Boltanski with 81 dim lights and 81 black mirrors covering loudspeakers from which come sentences about remembrance and concern. “Our goal,” said Daria Bonfietti, president of the victims’ families association, “is to make memories around the museum, in the best possible way. We want to remember through the arts, starting from the truths that have written the sentences of the courts”.

Not even the declassification of the documents on the massacres desired by the Renzi government has brought new details. «That night he is absent in the papers of the public administration. There is nothing from 1980 and subsequent years. There is nothing in the Ministry of Transport which instead is the one that immediately appoints a commission to ascertain what happened. The reports are from 1982 and then there’s nothing else» Daria Bonfietti explained to Vanity Fair.

If what happened that night in the Italian skies has been reconstructed over the years, it is equally unclear what forces were at play in what the judge Prior Rosary he called it an air war. It was the night of June 27, 1980, the night of the Ustica massacre.

The scheduled flight IH870, which departed from Bologna and was directed to Palermo, was operated by the DC-9 I-TIGI aircraft (the latter acronym will return to the show dedicated to Ustica by Marco Paolini) of the airline Itavia. There were 81 passengers and crew on board, who had waited for more than two hours to depart. The plane exploded in flight and fell into the Tyrrhenian Sea in the waters between the islands of Ponza and Ustica. The last contact with the Rome-Ciampino airport, which was responsible for that section of the Ambra 13 airway, was at 8.59 pm. 5 minutes passed, but from the flight, no one answered the call for authorization to start descent on Palermo. Hence the attempts of contact by the control towers of Rome and Palermo and also of two flights on the same route. No reply.

The rescue operations started at 9.25 pm directed by the Air Rescue Command of Martina Franca. From Ciampino at 9.55 pm the helicopters took off to reconnoiter the area of ​​the probable accident. The plane was reported missing. Only the next morning a rescue helicopter identified some debris on the surface about 110 km north of Ustica. Then come the other pieces of the plane and the bodies of the passengers. Only 38 bodies were found.