There are traces on the seabed of the Tyrrhenian Sea and tracks left by planes on radar that lead towards France. The willingness communicated by Paris to transfer their documentation on the case to the Italian magistrates investigating Ustica is therefore "good news", "but we need to understand whether they will actually collaborate". Leonardo Lecce, an aeronautical expert who was part of the commission appointed by the investigating judge Vittorio Bucarelli who carried out the assessment on the case between 1984 and 1990, told ANSA. Lecce was on board the 'Nadir', a ship of the French state company Ifremer - some say linked to transalpine services - responsible for recovering the aircraft at almost 4 thousand meters deep in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
From his long experience spent dealing with the matter with the in-depth examination of the recovered wreckage, Lecce has developed the belief that the DC9 was shot down by a missile. "According to our expert opinion - he recalls - the plane did not disintegrate in flight, as claimed by those who claimed the bomb was on board, but arrived intact upon impact with the water. We have clear evidence: the pieces were found in an area of a couple of kilometers while in the case of planes sunk due to the explosion of bombs on board the remains were scattered over a much larger area, up to 40 km".
And France? "In order to reconstruct what happened - informs the expert - it was essential to recover the remains of the aircraft. We first contacted a private American company: they told us that they were busy and it was they who reported Ifremer to us". With three missions between 1987 and 1988 at around 4 thousand meters below sea level, the Nadir together with the submerged Nautilus brought back to the surface around 70% of the weight of the DC9. Lecce followed the operations on board on behalf of the commission. "During these two years - he observes - we had the feeling, later confirmed by Ifremer herself, that they had returned to the site independently, without notifying us.
They told us that they had done it to develop recovery equipment. But we, looking at all the video footage that was taken, realized that on the seabed there were ruts from a vehicle that had been moved and this made us think." Furthermore, he adds, there is a gap in activity lasting almost a month from 2 March to 16 April 1988, as reported in a document drawn up by Captain Jean Roux at the end of the recovery operations.
It is not the only element that leads the expert to look with suspicion towards France. "We - he notes - carried out extensive investigations on military and civilian radars, to try to understand what had happened that night. Towards the end of our assignment Judge Bucarelli called us one night to show us the track produced by an Air Force site in Poggio Ballone, in Tuscany: the track had a very particular path, circular and not straight, near Corsica. A track unmistakably identifiable as that left by a radar plane at the same time as the Ustica event. military operations require on-site surveillance, which is why there was evidently a radar plane. From press reports we know that the aircraft carrier Clemenceau was sailing in Corsica at that time. This shows that the French have radar data which, as far as I know, were never handed over to the magistrates".
The hypothesis: that evening a NATO operation was underway with a triangulation between the USA, Great Britain and France to strike the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who should have been flying that evening. Operation from which Italy had been excluded because it was considered unreliable. It is therefore certainly not, in the expert's opinion, that - even after 46 years - France's move can actually pierce the rubber wall that protects the truth about Ustica.
