A Palermo judge on Thursday
ordered the Italian defence and transport ministries to pay a
total of 5,637,199 euros in damages to 14 family members related
to six people killed in a mysterious 1980 airplane crash near
the Sicilian island of Ustica.
Italy's supreme Court of Cassation last year ruled that a
missile was the definite cause of the crash in which 81 people
were killed while travelling on a commercial flight by the
now-defunct Itavia carrier on June 27, 1980.
It said that the hypothesis that the plane was downed in
1980 by a "missile shot by an unknown airplane" appears "by now
consecrated", adding that "cover-ups" in investigations must now
be considered "definitively ascertained".
It also ordered a new civil trial to assess the
responsibility of the Italian defence and transport ministries
in Itavia's bankruptcy.
In April Premier Matteo Renzi signed an order to
declassify a number of secret case files, including those on the
Ustica disaster.
Over the years, Italy has sought information from the
United States, France, Belgium and Germany about it.
In 2008 prosecutors reopened investigations after former
Italian president Francesco Cossiga suggested that a French
missile had shot down the plane by mistake.
Cossiga, who died in 2010, did not explain at the time why
he had waited so long before giving his views.
Dossiers, books, and even a film called The Rubber Wall
have been produced over the years about the airliner that
crashed into the sea on its way from Bologna to Palermo.
Two international panels examined the wreckage.
Investigating magistrate Rosario Priore and the
prosecutors who succeeded him insisted they had found clear
evidence of flight tracks being tampered with and radar scans
cleaned up to remove all trace of other planes in the vicinity
of the Itavia jet.
Magistrates and victims' relatives think the plane may have
become caught in a dogfight between NATO planes and a Libyan jet
whose wreckage was found in the southern Italian highlands some
months after the Ustica crash.
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