Itavia Flight 870

The role of Italian Air Force personnel in the tragedy is unclear. Several Air Force officials have been investigated and brought to court for a number of alleged offences, including falsification of documents, perjury, abuse of office and aiding and abetting. Four generals were charged with high treason, on the allegations that they obstructed government investigation of the accident by withholding information about air traffic at the time of Ustica disaster.

The first ruling, on 30 April 2004, pronounced two of the generals, Corrado Melillo and Zeno Tascio, not guilty of high treason. Lesser charges against a number of other military personnel were also dropped. Other allegations could not be pursued further after the expiration of the statute of limitations, as the disaster had occurred more than 15 years prior. For this same reason, action could not be taken against the other two generals, Lamberto Bartolucci and Franco Ferri. However, the ruling did not acquit them, and they were still alleged to be guilty of treason. In 2005, an appeals court ruled that the accusations were made on a complete absence of evidence. On 10 January 2007, the Italian Court of Cassation upheld this ruling and conclusively closed the case, fully acquitting Bartolucci and Ferri of any wrongdoing.

In June 2010, Italian President Giorgio Napolitano urged all Italian authorities to cooperate in the investigation of the incident.[8]

In September 2011, a Palermo civil tribunal ordered the Italian government to pay 100 million euros ($137 million) in civil damages to the relatives of the victims for failing to protect the flight, concealing the truth and destroying evidence.[9]

On 23 January 2013, the Civil Cassation Court ruled that there was "abundantly" clear evidence that the flight was brought down by a stray missile, confirming the lower court's order that the Italian government must pay compensation.[1]

In April 2015, an appeals court in Palermo confirmed the rulings of the 2011 Palermo civil tribunal and rejected an appeal by the state attorney.[10]

After the series of bombings that hit Italy in the 1970s, a terrorist act was the first explanation to be proposed. As the flight was delayed in Bologna by almost three hours, a bomb's timer may have been set to actually cause an explosion at the Palermo airport, or on a further flight of the same plane. The technical commission supporting a 1990 judicial enquiry reported that an explosion in the rear toilet, and not a missile strike, was the only conclusion supported by the wreckage analysis.[11]

Fourteen years after the accident, a 1994 joint investigation was carried out by the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) and Italian investigators; this team included veteran British Air Accident Investigator A. Frank Taylor and Engineer Goran Lilja of Sweden. The team was surprised that anyone came to any conclusion with so little of the aircraft recovered and asked the Italian government to fund another salvage operation to recover more of the aircraft from the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. While investigating the 21 December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, A.Frank Taylor helped create a software program that could locate widely scattered debris. This software program had two effects, 1) how far a piece will travel in the direction that the aircraft was originally traveling, and 2) how far the piece will be blown downwind. An additional 40% of the aircraft wreckage was located within a few meters of where the software program predicted it would be found. The location of the wreckage on the sea floor demonstrated which pieces came off the aircraft first.[3]

The investigation found conclusive physical evidence (as per the wreckage recovered) that a bomb had indeed exploded mid-flight in the rear lavatory. A large section of the aircraft's fuselage around the lavatory was never recovered (presumably having disintegrated in the explosion). A test explosion in a DC-9 lavatory showed the resulting deformation in the surrounding structure to be almost identical to that of the incident aircraft.

From “A Case History Involving Wreckage Analysis: Lessons from the Ustica investigations”

4 Investigation Findings

4.1 It was concluded that the accident was brought about by in-flight break- up resulting from extensive structural damage caused by the detonation of an explosive charge in the rear (starboard) toilet.

4.2 The charge was probably located in the outer wall of the toilet although other nearby positions cannot be ruled out.

4.3 For the preferred position the charge would most probably have been inserted via the tissue holder just forward of station 801 and pushed rearwards to lie to the rear of the frame at station 801 and at a height at or just above the lower skin of the adjacent engine pylon.

4.4 Other less likely but possible and accessible positions include either inside the toilet waste tank, via the waste hole, or on top of it, via the cupboard under the wash basin.[12]

However, the Italian high courts dismissed this final report as insignificant to their own investigation, and the report was never considered.

Major sources in the Italian media have alleged that the aircraft was shot down during a dogfight involving Libyan, United States, French and Italian Air Force fighters in an assassination attempt by NATO members on an important Libyan politician, perhaps even Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, who was flying in the same airspace that evening.[13] This version was supported in 1999 by investigative magistrate Rosario Priore,[14] who said in his concluding report that his investigation had been deliberately obstructed by the Italian military and members of the secret service, in compliance with NATO requests.[14]

According to the Italian media, documents from the archives of the Libyan secret service passed on to Human Rights Watch after the fall of Tripoli show that Flight 870 and a Libyan MiG were attacked by two French jets.[15]

On 18 July 1980, 21 days after the Aerolinee Itavia Flight 870 incident, the wreckage of a Libyan MiG-23, along with its dead pilot, was found in the Sila Mountains in Castelsilano, Calabria, southern Italy, according to official reports.[16]

Several conspiracy theories explaining the disaster persist.[17] For example, the vessel that carried out the search for debris on the ocean floor was French, but only US officials had access to the aircraft parts they found. Several radar reports were erased and several Italian generals were indicted 20 years later for obstruction of justice. The difficulty the investigators and the victims' relatives had in receiving complete, reliable information on the Ustica disaster has been popularly described as un muro di gomma (literally, a rubber wall),[18] because investigations just seemed to "bounce back".