The Italian judiciary is still waiting for answers from France on the Ustica massacre after more than thirty years

(by Fabrizio Colarieti) The Italian judiciary, in the context of two criminal investigations into the Ustica massacre, has been waiting for news from France since 1990, when, eleven times in six years, the then investigating judge Rosario Priore did not obtain exhaustive answers from Paris on the main questions linked to the shooting down of the Dc9 Itavia off the coast of Ustica on 27 June 1980.

Italy, since then, has been asking for radar recordings of the area where the DC-9 fell, the positions of the 'Clemenceau' and 'Foch' aircraft carriers, the flight plans of the French fighters headed for Libya and the mysterious 'friendly' track called 'LL004', detected by the radar of Poggio Ballone, in the province of Grosseto, near the Corsican base of the Armée de l'air in Solenzara. In 1996, France was asked to identify other aircraft at the origin of three radar signatures, the role of which was never clarified.

From 2010 to 2014, the prosecutor Erminio Amelio replied to the questions by asking for the logbooks of the two aircraft carriers and their routes, the radar tracks, the passage logs and again the movements in Solenzara, the names of the personnel in service and whether France participated in the 'Demon Jam V' exercise of July 1980. For the investigators it is certain that the Corsican base was operational after 5pm, a circumstance always denied by Paris. And witnesses - including former soldiers - told Italian prosecutors that they had seen a French aircraft carrier in the Tyrrhenian Sea, another element kept secret by the French.

But it wasn't just the French around the DC-9 that night.

Judge Priore concluded that the plane crashed during a real air battle in which US fighters (the Saratoga aircraft carrier was in the harbor in Naples) and NATO fighters also participated, traces of which remained in the Ciampino records.

An international operation that ended badly, but was destined to shoot down a Libyan MiG that was flying covered by the DC-9, perhaps the very same MiG later found on the Sila. The other version, also supported today by former minister Carlo Giovanardi, is that there was a bomb on board the plane and that it was put by alleged Palestinian terrorists.

It was first former president Francesco Cossiga and, more recently, former prime minister Giuliano Amato who attributed direct responsibility for the shooting down of the DC-9 and the resulting silence to the French. For prosecutor Antonio Clemente, who inherited the latest investigation, it will be decisive to understand whether the new documents that Paris promises to send to Rome contain the missing piece to get to the truth.