Massimo Giletti falls in Rai with a straight leg and certainly will not go unnoticed, choosing as the theme for his new prime time debut the massacre of Ustica. “Ustica: a breach in the wall” is the title of the program that today, at 9:20 p.m. on Rai3, will shed new light on one of the most famous unsolved Italian mysteries of the last century. After 44 years, there is still no unequivocal truth, a culprit or an explanation for what happened on June 27, 1980, when the DC-9 of the Itavia airline took off from Bologna to Palermo carrying 81 passengers. None of them ever reached the Sicilian capital, because the plane exploded in the sky and dispersed in the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Giletti, ideally continuing the work of the journalist Andrea Purgatori who studied the case for years, will host the program from the Museum of the Memory of Ustica in Bologna with exclusive reconstructions and unpublished interviews with those who experienced that terrible day from the Italian radar bases, understanding that something something strange was happening.
For the first time, the traces recorded by the electromagnetic wave instrument will be shown.
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The Helmet: A New Mystery to Solve
The great protagonist of this evening, however, is a helmet. A simple white helmet with two black arrows on the sides that Paolo Orofino, a journalist from the Quotidiano del Sud, encountered at the beginning of the 2000s. As reported on the newspaper’s website, it was a fisherman from Amantea who showed it to him, saying that he used it to ride his scooter after finding it entangled in his net in 1980. Inside the object you can see some acronyms and a name that refers to the American Air Force, but if it is somehow connected to the Ustica affair the public will have to be patient and find out by following the broadcast.
Whether it was a bomb, a collision with another plane or an explosion, no one has ever known and Giletti’s intent is precisely to clarify this by showing other documents in addition to the helmet. 21 days after the Ustica accident, a Mig-23 of the Libyan air force crashed on the Sila Calabrese and this evening one of the soldiers sent to guard it will give his version of events to understand if there is a connection between the two accidents. Furthermore, we will also hear the words of a French 007 who, on orders from his nation, never provided the radar tracks of the base in Corsica. This last testimony could be the missing piece to support the thesis that it was a missile that shot down the DC-9.
The missile thesis
In an interview with Repubblica last September Giuliano Amato, statesman, former prime minister and judge of the Constitutional Court) gave his version of the events of that evening. The French had devised a plan to kill Gaddafi in agreement with NATO, but the Libyan leader did not get on the plane that was supposed to take him abroad, perhaps having been warned by someone. A French fighter took to the skies in pursuit of the MiG which, according to this reconstruction, hid behind the Itavia plane. The civilian flight was then hit by accident.
To further attempt to unravel the intricate skein that is this Italian mystery, the public will have to wait until 9.20pm this evening, Massimo Giletti and his “Ustica: a breach of the wall” on Rai3.
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