“How are we going to thank him enough?” asks Daria Bonfietti, president of the Association of the families of the victims of the Ustica massacre while between one phone call and another she finds herself retracing 43 years of civil and legal battles to bring out the truth about the shooting down of the DC9 Itavia which left from Bologna and bound for Palermo, on board which 81 people died. Forty-three years in which Andrea Purgatory he never stopped searching for the truth. “I never thought I’d have to remember that after his death” sighs embittered Bonfietti, while still using the present tense to remember the journalist who leaves a huge void in those who knew him.
How important was Purgatori for you relatives of the victims?
«It was very important for me, for all of us, because on that night, as he has been repeating for many years now, on June 27, 1980 he received a phone call from a military friend who worked at Ciampino who said to him “Did you see? A plane crashed, don’t get fooled… it was shot down”. These are the words that Andrea Purgatori has always delivered to us and that tell us why he started this battle ».
Was it difficult for him at the time to go against the official reconstructions?
«He started the battle for Ustica, writing in the Corriere della Sera all the news that belied the official reconstruction. Always remember, excessively, that the truth for our institutions was that it was a structural failure. This was told by the generals of the Air Force, who thus made the ministers on duty answer questions in Parliament. And instead Andrea didn’t believe it because his friend had told him other things and he fought a very hard battle. In 1981 he was the one who met John Macidull of the Nation Transportation Safety Board (the US transport safety agency, ed) who said that from the only surviving radar trace it was very clear that there was a trail (of another aircraft, ed) that crossed the line of the DC9 which had therefore been shot down. Then in ’82 he met John Trensue, also another great aeronautical expert (of the Pentagon, ed) who told the truth about the shooting down of this plane ».
When did you meet him?
«I have to say that if I began to commit myself to the search for the truth back in 1985, waking up from sleep, from desperation, from the inability to face this story, it is also because I felt that the worm that had put Andrea Purgatori inside me in those years had worked inside me, I felt that the truth was not the structural failure. Then when we started our judicial battle there was certainly the interest of intelligence men, Giuliano Amato as undersecretary to the Prime Minister authorized the recovery of the wreck at the bottom of the sea: all things that gave us the possibility to start work and study about what could have happened that night, but it’s all thanks to Andrea who never let go of the truth that had been told to him in the immediacy of the event».
It was crucial.
«As you know, he made a beautiful film, «The rubber wall», in the 90s with Marco Risi, he carried out a tireless activity towards these generals who told lies and were indicted for high treason, because they had told of lies, they had deceived, destroyed everything they could destroy to prevent the truth from reaching. But Andrea helped us get there and in ’99 a judge was able to write that the DC9 was shot down in an aerial warfare scenario. Too bad we could have known it right away and instead it went like this. The merit of the civil battle for truth and justice of the great man and journalist who was Andrea Purgatori is truly unforgettable”.
A battle that is not over yet…
“We still don’t know who shot down the DC9. With Andrea Purgatori we were still struggling to find out which of the States present that night in our skies is responsible. He also repeated it in the last video broadcast by Rai, Luci per Ustica (by Luciano Mannuzzi and Luigi Riva, ed), that there was the presence of these 4 entities in our skies which are the USA, France, Libya and Italy but we still don’t know who wanted to do what, who had to do what. Enough to prevent the truth from being told for too many years ».