“He told me to reply to the Italians that the radar was under maintenance and full stop”. The radar in question was the Solenzara air base in Corsica and a former military attaché of the French embassy in Rome speaking to the Rai microphones in the late 1980s. Answering questions from journalist Massimo Giletti for the special “Ustica: a breach in the wall” which will be broadcast on Rai Tre on Tuesday 25 June at 9.20pm, the man claims to have understood that he had to “deal with it alone” and that when he The Italian General Staff asked the French for information and the response was that the radars were not working.
A detail, which if confirmed, would add to the hypotheses formulated by the former prime minister, Giuliano Amato, which triggered a controversy last year. The former president claimed in an interview that the DC-9 plane that crashed on 27 June 1980 during a scheduled flight from Bologna to Palermo was destroyed by mistake by a French missileintended to kill the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. A hypothesis that converged on the testimony given in 2007 by Francesco Cossiga – president emeritus of the Republic and head of government at the time of the events – on the basis of which an investigation file had been opened by the Rome prosecutor’s office. A few hours after the publication of the interview, the Foreign Ministry intervened on the point: “France has provided information on this tragedy every element in his possession every time she was asked, especially in the context of the investigations conducted by the Italian justice system. We obviously remain available to work with Italy if it asks us.”
“The Italian general staff asked me to ask the French general staff for the radar detection of that night – the man states during the interview with Giletti -. The French colonel told me that since the Solenzara base was closed, the Italian General Staff was informed that the radar was under maintenance“. Giletti, therefore, asks if the Transalpine general staff had limited themselves to telling him ‘do it yourself or did they tell you what to report to the Italians? “They didn’t tell me specifically – he replies in the recorded dialogue – but I understood that I had to deal with it on my own. They told me to reply to the Italians that the radar was under maintenance and that’s it. These things were told to me over the phone. I therefore went to visit General De Carolis. He was my secret service contact and I told him: ‘The French General Staff is sending you this message.’
That the French base was instead open and operational had already emerged ten years ago on the eve of the 34th anniversary. The Rome prosecutor’s office, at the time, had managed to track down 14 former soldiers of theArmée de l’air who were on duty at the base that evening, whose fighters, it was admitted, flew well after the declared five in the afternoon. Yet it was the base that had long been said to be “closed”, no longer operational since the middle of that afternoon. But there were those who denied it official version of the French: the general of the carabinieri Nicolò Bozzo who, by chance, was on holiday not far away that summer. And who, over time, said it and reiterated it: on the evening of 27 June 1980 French planes had taken off and landed from that Corsican base so much so that, at the time, completely unaware of what had just happened further south, he he was able to sleep due to the air traffic. That he probably had to be able to count on a functioning and operational radar.
