Italy's Ustica Crash Gets New Evidence

On 27 June 1980, Itavia Flight 870 fell into the Tyrrhenian Sea between Bologna and Palermo, killing all 81 people aboard. No official account has ever been accepted as final. A former Italian president, Francesco Cossiga, stated before his death that a French military aircraft had accidentally struck the plane — possibly while targeting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi — a claim France has never confirmed.

The French decision to hand over defence files to the Italian judiciary is, by any measure, an unusual act of institutional disclosure between two NATO allies bound by competing loyalties to their own classified records. What those files contain is not yet public. Investigators have spent 46 years assembling a picture in which the wreckage, the flight recorder and witness testimony all point toward a missile strike, while the identity of the responsible party remains legally unresolved.

Sceptics, as France 24 reports, caution that the documents are unlikely to settle the central question of culpability. The families of the 81 who died have waited through multiple trials, acquittals and appeals. Whether French military archives hold anything the Italian judiciary does not already possess is the only question that now matters — and the answer is not yet known.