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A brick wall, about one meter high, will continue to unite the journalist Andrea Purgatori in Bologna and in memory of Ustica massacre. On the day of his 71st birthday, in the park of the Museum for the memory of Ustica in via Saliceto, the “Andrea’s Wall”: a plaque with a QR code through which visitors will be able to access the collection of all the articles on the Corriere della Sera with which the Roman journalist brought to light the truth aboutplane crash of 27 June 1980.
A moving and participatory ceremony, the one at the Zucca Park. Friends and former colleagues of Purgatori, the families of the victims of Ustica and other massacres that hit Bologna and the institutions have rallied around two of the journalist’s sons, Edward and Victoria, to remember the pain of the journalist’s passing last July but above all the value of the legacy he left through his work: “For him Ustica was a piece of life – says Edoardo -. What moves me most is the bond he established with each of the victims’ families. When Andrea passed away we lost a father but they lost a point of reference. The ‘Muretto’ is a way to continue what was his fight for truth”.
A stone’s throw from the Muretto you can enter the Museum which houses the wreck of the DC-9, the Itavia airline plane that left Bologna’s Marconi airport for Palermo on 27 June 1980. But he will never arrive at the Punta Raisi airport: at 8.59pm, while flying over the islands of Ponza and Ustica, he was involved in the accident in which 81 people died between passengers and flight staff. An episode that for years the official version of the Ministry of Defense and the Air Force classified as “structural failure”.
Red thread Ustica-Uno Bianca, the families of the victims: “Savi had information”
Purgatori, just 27 years old, immediately began digging behind the “rubber wall” of silences and lies and get to the truth (which only became judicial in recent times): the DC-9 was shot down by a rocket launched from an airplane. A French fighter during a fake NATO exercise to hit a Lebanese Mig is the complementary thesis of the families of the victims of the Ustica massacre: “Andrea knew it immediately – recalls the spokeswoman Daria Bonfietti – that night a military friend called him from Ciampino and told him that the plane had been shot down and not to let himself be fooled. His work was to create the worm of doubt in the heads of many of us and this allowed us to get to the truth about Ustica”. “Andrea was the best journalist I worked with, he had a method that I have never seen in anyone else”, adds the deputy director of Corriere della Sera Fiorenza Sarzanini.
Goodbye to Andrea Purgatori, Lepore: “Bologna will be forever grateful to you”
In the city, the day dedicated to the journalist will continue in the afternoon with a screening of “Il muro di rubber”, a film by, at the Modernissimo Cinema Marco Risi inspired by the Purgatori investigation and written by him. The mayor also participated in the unveiling of the plaque Matteo Lepore: “Purgatori was a great journalist and a fundamental resource for the families of the victims and for Bologna. This plaque will from now on remind all people who pass through the park not only of the figure of Purgatori but also of his important journalistic work”.
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