It is June 27, 1980. The DC9 Itavia 870 plane with 81 people on board leaves from Bologna airport almost two hours late, heading towards Palermo. After 8.59pm the plane disappeared from radar, sinking in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea. 44 years have passed since then, there have been 19 sentences but what happened that night over the Italian skies remains essentially a mystery. The war scenario over Ustica and the shooting down of the DC9 with one or more missiles remains the most plausible hypothesis. But who dropped that missile or those missiles? And why? Over the years, various leads have been explored: Italian, American, Libyan and above all French.
The fifth scenario, the Israeli track
In the episode aired last night, Report dusted off what is defined as the fifth scenario, i.e. the Israeli track. Not exactly new. The investigation carried out by Luca Chianca in fact recalls the book by the journalist Claudio Gatti, the first supporter of this thesis, author of the book “The Fifth Scenario – Second Act”, FuoriScena editions. “Act two” because already in 1994 Gatti had dedicated a book to the Israeli trail which is now enriched with documents and testimonies discovered over years of work. According to this thesis, the shooting down of DC9 could be part of a tragic operational error, which occurred to block the supply of enriched uranium that France was sending with civilian planes to Iraq to develop Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, an existential threat to the State of Israel .
Israeli fighters over Calabrian skies
Report interviewed two witnesses. The first is the lawyer from Catanzaro Enrico Brogneri who had already told Gatti some time ago that on the evening of the tragedy he had seen a military plane flying very low over the sky of Catanzaro. The second, interviewed by Luca Chianca of Report, is Sebastiano Stranges. That evening in Bovalino, on the Ionian coast of Calabria, he saw a strange scene: a military fighter stopped and made a few turns, waiting for two other similar planes before continuing. The planes seen by Stranges and Brogneri had a shape similar to Israeli fighters and a peculiarity: someone had painted a coat of paint on the livery so as to make their nationality unrecognizable.
What lawyer Brogneri saw
Enrico Brogneri, a lawyer from Catanzaro, on the evening of 27 June 1980, spotted a military plane flying at low altitude in an obvious state of failure near the Ceravolo stadium. In the newspapers, no news of that fighter, nor of an emergency landing, nor of a crash into the ground. On 27 June 1980, the tragedy of Ustica took place a few hundred kilometers from Catanzaro. Is there a relationship between the two events? Brogneri’s path, which inevitably ends up being interested in the story, starts from a fixed point, that is, from the certainty of what he saw. In a previous interview he had stated verbatim: “I had just left my parents’ house and I was driving my Renault 5 car. I had to pick up my wife and then reach the house in Catanzaro Lido. Driving along via Jan Palach, I noticed that a military plane was flying over the city of Catanzaro at a dangerously low altitude. The aforementioned aircraft seemed old, had small dimensions and a triangular and compact shape, and proceeded in obvious difficulty while gliding with the lights and engines off. I have given the investigators more than enough information to be able to affirm that the sighting undoubtedly occurred at approximately 9.20 pm on 27.6.1980, i.e. 20 minutes after the fall of the DC9 Itavia”. According to the lawyer from Catanzaro, it is not the Libyan MiG found a few weeks later in Sila. “Over time – said Brogneri in a 2018 interview and still present on the web – I recognized in it the possible outline of a Mirage or a Kfir, an Israeli plane”.
THREE LINKS TO KNOW MORE
Report, the fifth scenario
Interview with lawyer Brogneri: “They removed the plane I saw and replaced it with a Libyan Mig”
On the edge of Ustica, the story of an inconvenient witness
