A former Italian prime minister shocked the world today after claiming that a French Air Force missile downed a passenger jet in 1980, killing 81 people in a failed attempt to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi.
Former two-time Prime Minister Giuliano Amato said the plane was accidentally attacked over the Mediterranean and a Libyan military aircraft was the real target.
Amato appealed to French President Emmanuel Macron to refute or confirm his claim about the cause of the crash of Itavia Flight 870 on June 27, 1980.
In an interview with the Roman daily La Repubblica, Amato said he is convinced France hit the plane while targeting a Libyan plane it believed Gaddafi was on board.
And Amato also claimed that Italy tipped off Gaddafi so that the Libyan, who was on his way to Tripoli from a meeting in Yugoslavia, would not board the military plane.
What caused the crash is one of modern Italy’s most enduring mysteries.
Some say a bomb exploded aboard the Itavia plane on a flight from Bologna to Sicily, while others say examination of the wreckage, retrieved years later from the seabed, indicates it was hit by a missile.
Amato appealed to French President Emmanuel Macron to refute or confirm his claim about the cause of the crash of Itavia Flight 870 on June 27, 1980.
An Italian Carabinieri police officer patrols a hangar in Pratica di Mare, near Rome, Monday, December 15, 2003, the reconstructed wreckage of the Itavia DC-9 passenger plane that crashed on June 27, 1980 near the small Mediterranean island of Ustica.
Radar trails indicated a wave of aircraft activity in that part of the sky when the plane crashed.
Mr. Amato was quoted as saying, “The most credible version is that of the responsibility of the French air force, in complicity with the Americans and who took part in an air war that evening of June 27.”
NATO planned to “recreate an exercise, where many planes were in action, where a missile would be fired” targeting Gaddafi, Amato said.
In the aftermath of the crash, French, US and NATO officials denied any military activity in the skies that night.
According to Mr Amato, a missile was said to have been fired by a French fighter jet that had taken off from an aircraft carrier, possibly off the southern coast of Corsica.
Macron, 45, was a toddler when the passenger jet crashed into the sea near the small Italian island of Ustica.
Mr Amato told La Repubblica: “I wonder why a young president like Macron, although his age has nothing to do with the Ustica tragedy, would not want to remove the shame that weighs on France.
And he can remove it only in two ways – by showing that this statement is baseless, or, once the foundations of this statement have been verified, by offering the deepest apologies to Italy and to the families in the name of his country. of the victims. government.’
Mr Amato, who is 85, said that when he was prime minister in 2000, he wrote a letter to the then presidents of the United States and France, Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac, to pressure them to shed light on what had happened.
But in the end, those pleas led to “total silence,” Amato said.
When questioned by The Associated Press, Macron’s office said it would not immediately comment on Mr Amato’s comments.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has called on Mr Amato to say if he has concrete elements to substantiate his claims so that her government can pursue further investigations.
Mr Amato’s words “deserve attention,” Ms Meloni said in a statement, noting that the former prime minister had specified that his claims “are the result of personal inferences.”
Claims of French involvement are not new.
In a 2008 TV interview, former Italian president Francesco Cossiga, who was prime minister at the time of the tragedy, blamed the crash on a French missile that had targeted a Libyan military aircraft and said he had learned that the military branch of the Italian secret service had given a tip. Gaddafi.
Gaddafi was killed in 2011 during the Libyan civil war.
A few weeks after the crash, the wreckage of a Libyan MiG, with the badly decomposed body of the pilot, was discovered in the remote mountains of southern Calabria.