A mysterious phone call to an Italian journalist...
Where did you get this information?
And he said: 'do not believe what they are going to say.'
throws an air crash investigation into turmoil.
We absolutely have to have more of the wreckage.
There are rumours of a cover-up.
Nobody on the legal side believed us.
Investigators suspect foul play.
I think it was a bomb.
81 people are killed in an instant.
All of a sudden, the airplane was in pieces in the sky.
It was shot down by a missile.
What brought down the passenger plane?
A bomb? Or a missile?
They said that my theory was ridiculous.
The goal that we were presented with was to find the truth.
Mayday! Mayday!
In the glow of the setting sun,
Itavia Airlines flight 870
cruises 29,000 feet above the Mediterranean Sea.
Good evening,
870 maintaining 290,
over Puma.
(Roger. Proceed Latina, Ponza.)
Roma 870.
Captain Domenico Gatti
and First Officer Enzo Fontana
are at the controls of the DC-9.
The crew had the kind of experience
that you would hope to see
with your...with your own particular crew on the flight
that you're just about to take.
And the flight itself was short and very easy to do.
Among the 77 passengers
is Alberto Bonfietti,
a journalist on his way to meet his family in Palermo.
Grazie.
That Friday afternoon, my brother Alberto
took that plane to go to Palermo and meet his wife and daughter
who were already there on vacation.
(Bologna) (Rome)
The flight from Bologna to Palermo
takes about an hour and a half.
But just half way to their destination,
First Officer Fontana is running into a problem.
Look at this. I'm getting nothing.
Try Ponza instead.
Nothing.
There's no signal from many of the navigation beacons
that normally guide pilots towards Palermo.
870, Roma,
it's like a graveyard tonight.
(We haven't found a single beacon working properly.)
Everything is a bit out.
(What is your heading?)
(We are at 1-9-5.)
Without the beacons,
the pilots need directions from air traffic control.
(I don't know if you want to keep that heading.)
Otherwise you can go right 15 or 20 degrees.
Okay. We put in 210.
The plane turns...
and flies into a pocket of turbulence.
High level turbulence... it, it's just like,
it's like being on a road which has got pot holes in it.
On many flights that anybody will take
at some stage during the journey,
you will encounter some degree of turbulence.
The pilots hope a lower altitude
will give their passengers a smoother ride.
Let's try to get under this.
This is 870.
Is it possible to get 2-5-0?
Affirmative. You can start your descent now.
Pilots quite often ask for a change of level
if they've got a little bit of choppiness,
which they know will make the passengers uncomfortable
or even nervous,
then they'll try another level.
And that's what we think they were trying to do.
There we go. Finally.
There's more good news.
Palermo is coming in well.
The navigation beacons are now working.
And we have...we have the Ponza DME.
Good. Call back for descent.
(Thank you for everything.)
We'll call you for descent.
(870.)
The controllers will have no further contact with the pilots
until they begin their landing.
But just seconds later...
Itavia flight 870 breaks into pieces
and disappears from radar.
Itavia 870,
Rome.
Itavia 870,
Rome.
We're missing a flight.
Itavia 870.
It's gone.
Flight 870 has crashed into the Mediterranean Sea.
It's very surreal for a controller
to go through an experience like that,
because you can't quite believe what you're seeing.
I mean accidents are very, very rare.
So when you're a part of one,
when you're watching one happen, you don't quite believe it.
By morning, Italian search and rescue teams
are scanning the waters near the plane's last known position.
Family members waiting at the airport
are told only that the plane is missing,
its fate unknown.
The first words we heard
were that the plane was assumed to be lost.
Searchers soon confirm the worst.
There are no signs of any survivors.
All 81 passengers and crew are dead,
including Alberto Bonfietti.
I bought my brother's ticket for that damn flight
and I never saw him again.
The loss of flight 870 makes news around the world.
There seems to be no way to explain
why a modern airliner fell from the sky so suddenly.
Andrea Purgatori is a well-known reporter
for one of Italy's largest daily newspapers.
In 1980, I was an investigative reporter
for Corriere della Sera,
which...which was and is still,
the most important newspaper in Italy.
On the night of the crash, he gets an astounding phone call.
I received a phone call from an air traffic controller in Rome.
Where did you get this information?
And he said: 'I cannot talk to you long from this phone,'
'but do not believe what they are going to say'
'because it was shot down by a missile.'
The source points him toward a controversial theory:
flight 870 was caught in the crossfire
during a dogfight between NATO and Libyan jets.
There was a situation of tension in the Mediterranean
which was, which was very close to,
you know, the tension you have before a war.
In 1980, the Mediterranean is a military hot zone.
Italy lies just across the sea from Libya.
It's an outlaw nation
ruled by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi,
an international pariah.
At that time Gaddafi
was like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden
for the United States and most of the Western world.
Has the political tension between Libya and the West
somehow claimed the lives of 81 innocent people?
Yes, I can guarantee your identity is safe with me.
Purgatori is convinced he's on the verge of breaking
a major international story.
That was the kind of story that as, as a reporter,
I mean, you can find probably once in your life, once in your career.
Okay. Let's meet.
But it will take more than 30 years
to find out what really happened that night in the skies over Italy.
2 days after the Itavia Airlines tragedy,
Andrea Purgatori writes a front-page story
that shocks Italy and the world.
It's out.
I was the first to say okay,
there's a possibility that the DC-9 was hit by, by a missile.
Purgatori does some digging
and comes up with an astonishing theory.
Western jet fighters, probably French,
were engaging in an act of war with Libyan airplanes.
And...the Libyan airplanes were probably
hiding themselves behind the DC-9.
And the, the DC-9 was just, you know,
in the wrong place in the wrong moment
and it was hit by one of the missiles.
The Italian government dismisses early media reports
that a missile brought down Flight 870,
and launches an official investigation into the crash.
The Italian Air Force decided to give a press conference
which they said that my theory was ridiculous.
38 bodies have been recovered from the crash site.
But most of the wreckage from flight 870
has sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean.
Investigators have little to go on.
Is this all we have?
The early investigators of this accident
didn't have very much to look at.
There wasn't very much wreckage.
They hope air traffic controllers on duty at the time of the crash
will have more information.
There was some problem with the beacons on the night.
But, otherwise, everything seemed fine.
But the controllers have no idea what went wrong.
Palermo is coming in well.
Good. Call back for descent.
They heard no sign of trouble from the crew.
(Thank you for everything.)
We'll call you for the descent.
870.
If it's a slowly gathering emergency
where things go wrong bit by bit
until the aircraft becomes uncontrollable,
the pilots as sure as hell are going to tell somebody.
They didn't. They didn't have time to.
So, whatever it was had been really sudden.
A mid-air collision could explain the accident.
The controllers can't say for sure
if there were other aircraft nearby.
Their radar is tuned to detect airliners
and may not have picked up smaller planes.
This is all that I saw.
Investigators need a solid lead.
They have no proof that a missile brought down the plane,
but there's no proof of any other cause either.
We need to look at every possible explanation.
An investigator, of course,
if, for example, the press is speculating about,
about the aircraft having been shot down,
the investigators will read that like they're,
like other people do,
but they'll be keeping an open mind.
They study other incidents involving the same type of plane.
They were casting around for any historic evidence
that might tell them what happened.
They learn that in the last decade,
4 other DC-9s suffered structural failures.
If the Itavia plane
broke apart because of metal fatigue, or a design flaw,
thousands of lives could be at risk.
But the research sheds no new light on the crash.
This one landed safely.
In each previous emergency,
the pilots have enough warning to take action...
This one too.
and land their planes safely.
We've got nothing here.
With most of the wreckage at the bottom of the sea,
investigators have only floating debris to work with.
You can have seat cushions, they float.
Equipment from the galleys,
from the kitchens onboard the aircraft,
they float.
Plastic components from the overhead lockers,
these are all...the sorts of things that you would expect to float.
And sure enough they found those.
They carefully map the location of each recovered piece.
The size and shape of the debris field
could provide clues about what happened.
Let me see those winds again.
If the DC-9 hit the water in one piece,
it would have disintegrated on impact
leaving debris in a small, concentrated area.
But if it broke up in flight,
its forward momentum would have scattered debris over a large area.
Pieces of the plane have been found
spread across more than 200 square kilometres of ocean.
It's a revealing discovery.
Too far apart to happen on impact.
The crew didn't know it was coming.
Air traffic control didn't know it was coming.
And then, all of a sudden,
the airplane was in pieces in the sky.
Investigators scrutinise the debris
for evidence that another airplane collided with flight 870.
They find nothing.
Speculation about a missile strike only grows stronger.
Certainly there were many reports, the newspapers, the television...
the media talked about it a lot.
Investigators hope a detailed analysis of the radar
can give them some answers.
They want to know if there was anything else in the skies
that could have brought down the plane.
They contact John Macidull
of the US National Transportation Safety Board.
Alright, let's see what we can see.
Macidull is well suited for the job.
He's a former Navy pilot and a radar expert.
There is an obligation for the United States
to help other countries with their investigation
of an aircraft accident in their country
if it was a United States manufactured aircraft.
In this case, it was a Douglas DC-9.
He studies an enhanced version
of Flight 870's radar track,
one that shows more detail
than the air traffic controller could see.
I received their radar printout
which included the beacon code track of this DC-9.
It looks like this is where it broke up.
Here are the pieces here.
Radar works by bouncing radio waves off objects.
When a plane breaks apart,
each piece creates its own signal or return.
Air traffic controllers tune their radar to detect airliners,
but radar can be adjusted to display other objects.
I want to get a closer look at this.
You eventually start getting more than one radar return.
So, there's, there's plenty to see.
Macidull sees no sign of a mid-air collision.
Now, what have we here?
But he does notice something unusual.
There are 3 unidentified radar blips to the west of flight 870.
Macidull reaches a startling conclusion.
At that altitude and this kind of speed,
I'd say that was a high-speed jet.
He could see traces of another airplane
which was not a civil plane.
Coming from the west, at that time of day...
they'd never see them coming.
This unidentified object came out of the sun,
which is a standard in fighter pilot technique.
Blinded by the sun,
the DC-9 pilots would have had little chance
to spot an incoming jet.
I told them that... that it was possible
that something was fired from another aircraft.
It was quite clear that
it was a fighter shooting a missile.
Macidull's analysis makes it more likely than ever
that a fighter jet was flying near the DC-9.
But there's still no proof of a missile.
It could have been a missile.
It looks like a missile.
It was a missile. We need to prove it.
3 weeks after the crash,
new evidence comes to light.
The wreckage of a Libyan fighter jet
is found in the mountains of southern Italy.
The discovery raises more suspicion
and adds fuel to the missile theory.
In my opinion, there were French fighters
taking off from the base of Solenzara in the island of Corsica,
intercepting the Libyan planes and there was an act of war.
For reporter Andrea Purgatori,
the crashed fighter confirms his belief
that flight 870 was an unintended casualty
in a secret skirmish between NATO and Libyan jets.
Were the French firing to the Libyans or the Libyans firing to the French,
this, this is difficult to say.
But then the French fighters tried to chase the Libyan plane
until it crashed on the mountains of Calabria
in the southern part of Italy.
The aircraft disappeared.
There was an explosion.
Was it a missile?
Certainly, I thought, yeah, this is,
this is going to be distinctly possible.
So far, the evidence for a missile strike
is circumstantial.
Then investigators get a lucky break.
They come across an intriguing clue:
a piece of shrapnel embedded in the body of a passenger.
If they can identify where it came from,
it might tell them what caused the explosion.
There's something I would like you to see.
Italian investigators
travel to Washington with the piece of metal.
-Welcome to Washington, sir. -Grazie.
-Is this it? -Yes.
They ask the NTSB's John Macidull
to help identify it.
Okay. Let's take a look at it.
It was about that size of a pen,
slightly curved, okay. Flat on one side.
Now where are you from?
It was found in the thigh of one of the passengers.
At NTSB
we had structural schematics of an entire DC-9.
And based on what I thought about missiles,
I started looking at the... the middle of the aircraft.
The type of metal hints that it's from outside the cabin.
We're gonna need to look at the wheel wells.
We looked in both wheel wells
and matched this piece of metal up
with the curved ribbing, unique ribbing in this panel...
Next.
under the right wheel well, not the left wheel well.
It wouldn't match the left wheel well.
Bingo.
Say the jet fired the missile from here.
It would explode as soon as it got close, about here.
That would drive the shrapnel
including our piece from the wheel well into the cabin.
So to me it was conclusive information.
My reaction after John Macidull's conclusions was,
you know, 'I was right.'
Investigators send pieces of wreckage to the lab
to test for explosives.
The analysis confirms an explosion.
The debris is coated with trace amounts of TNT.
But the result doesn't prove a missile brought down the plane.
It's just as possible the explosives came from a bomb.
TNT is not only used by the military.
I wouldn't say it's easiest to get hold of
but somebody who's determined enough could get a hold of it.
5 weeks after the Itavia disaster,
Italians are shocked by another tragedy.
A bombing at the Bologna railway station
kills 85 people.
Neo-fascist terrorists are blamed for the attack,
fuelling fears that the same group
may have placed a bomb on flight 870.
You must remember that in this country,
we had so many episodes of terrorism, bombings,
which were not clear.
The new evidence leaves investigators with a dilemma.
They have circumstantial evidence
for both the missile and the bomb theories.
But there's no hard proof
to determine which one caused the explosion.
We're going to have to say we don't know.
The commission of the transportation ministry,
worked for 2 years and ended,
saying that the accident was caused by an explosion.
But they were not able to say
if the explosion was outside or inside the plane,
a bomb or a missile.
Under extreme public pressure to come up with an answer,
the Italian government issues a report
that only says an explosion of unknown origin
brought down the plane.
It's very unsatisfactory. It's distressing.
You can't say that...
any of us, like me, who care about things like this,
or particularly for the families,
you can't say they have closure.
Daria Bonfietti continues to demand answers
about what happened to her brother.
She's not alone in her fight.
Under our guidance,
a group of intellectuals wrote a letter to the president of Italy
asking why we didn't know the truth about this accident
and asking that all obstacles be removed
so that the truth can come out.
The pressure pays off.
5 years after the first inconclusive investigation,
the Italian government agrees to launch a new inquiry.
In May of 1987,
a multi-million dollar salvage operation
recovers the cockpit voice recorder.
It could be the break investigators need
to find out what really brought down Itavia flight 870.
7 years after flight 870 crashed into the Mediterranean,
the cockpit voice recorder allows investigators
to hear what the pilots said
during the last moments of the flight.
(Itavia 870,)
(call back for descent.)
(Thank you for everything.)
We'll call you for descent.
870.
The captain starts to say 'guarda',
Italian for 'look'.
Guarda.
Then the recording abruptly cuts off.
Investigators wonder if he caught a glimpse of a missile
heading for the plane.
It's what you would expect someone to say
if they saw something that was really strange
coming toward you.
Conjecture is he was starting to say 'look.'
But you might say:
Look at the artificial horizon.
It could have been that.
The salvage effort has recovered
hundreds of pieces of debris from the sea floor.
They're now being reassembled at a hangar near Rome.
More than 50 percent of the aircraft remains missing.
But the outline of the plane begins to take shape.
It's a jigsaw puzzle.
If you theorised on how the aircraft came apart,
the more you can visually build up this picture,
the more clear that becomes.
A key piece of debris
adds weight to the theory that a missile hit the plane.
It has 2 small holes with edges that bend in not out.
Investigators have also discovered
debris in a seat cushion from the cabin.
It's from a galley at the front of the plane.
If a missile exploded near the front of the plane,
it might have blown the piece toward the back.
But there is too much wreckage missing
to reach a definitive conclusion.
It's not much to go on.
We have some wreckage.
We have some evidence from radar.
But, it's not primary evidence.
The real evidence is the bits of airplane.
Italian investigators are under intense pressure
to announce what blew the plane apart.
People started to say:
'tell us exactly what happened to this airplane.'
It all fits with the missile theory.
They decide to stick their necks out.
In 1989, they release an accident report
that concludes the explosion
was probably caused by a missile fired from an unidentified aircraft.
As the first person to advance that theory,
reporter Andrea Purgatori
feels vindicated.
I was right.
I was right in... in investigating this case,
in...putting, you know, the truth,
the possible truth, piece by piece together.
Because of this and only from this moment,
we, the relatives of the victims,
started to say that the DC-9 was hit by a missile.
But just one year later,
the entire investigation crumbles when the unthinkable happens.
Citing a lack of evidence,
2 Italian investigators
retract their opinion that a missile brought down the plane.
We're back at square one.
It's quite rare to have so little certainty, about an accident.
This is a very extraordinary accident in that respect.
The Italian government orders a third investigation
to answer the question once and for all.
Did a missile bring down flight 870, or was it a bomb?
They assemble an international group of experts.
Including veteran British Air Crash investigator
Frank Taylor.
Let's get those set-up over there.
The goal that we were presented with was to find the truth.
To find out what had actually happened and report on that.
And that, that was that was fair, that was absolutely splendid
because that's what you do in an investigation.
You look at the evidence and try to work out what it means.
Taylor is uniquely qualified to identify evidence of a bomb.
He's investigated more than 20 air disasters
including the bombing of Pan Am flight 103
over Lockerbie, Scotland.
In 1988, Libyan terrorists
planted a bomb in the cargo hold of flight 1-0-3.
When it exploded, it destroyed the plane, killing 270 people.
Engineer Goran Lilja of Sweden
is also on Taylor's team.
Taylor is immediately concerned
by how little wreckage has been recovered from flight 870.
Is this all the wreckage you've got?
We were surprised that anybody came to any conclusion,
at all on the evidence we have,
other than that, it was almost certainly an explosion
of some sort, somewhere.
Well, the first thing we've got to do is find the rest of this plane.
Taylor's first job is to convince the government
to fund a new search.
Yes. Could you put me through please?
It could cost millions
and there's no guarantee it will solve the case.
No. I, I, we absolutely have to have more of the plane.
A basic conclusion from what we inherited
was that we needed to recover more wreckage,
and we said so very clearly.
There's no way to make any conclusions
without more of the wreckage.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Thanks very much. Thank you. Bye.
If anyone can find the wreckage,
it could be Taylor.
During the Lockerbie investigation,
he helped create a software program
to locate widely scattered debris.
You have 2 effects,
how far a piece will travel
in the direction that the aircraft was originally traveling
and how far it will be blown downwind
by whatever winds there are.
But the, but the computer can do this very easily.
Taylor convinces the Italian government
that his program can find more wreckage.
Okay. Altitude around 24,000.
They approve his request for a new salvage operation.
Wind is westerly about 100 knots.
But the pressure's on to deliver.
Now that's where we should be looking.
The wind data was available,
so we could feed that into our computer,
and it told us more or less
where the rest of the wreckage would be.
The strategy works.
The effort soon recovers another 40 percent of the plane.
Eventually we found it.
It was there more or less, you know,
within a few metres virtually of where we'd predicted.
The location of the wreckage on the sea floor
tells Taylor which pieces came off the plane first.
Investigators now have a theory about how the plane came down.
See those first pieces?
The explosion was at the back of the plane, not the front.
Then it hit nose first like this.
The reconstruction seems to match his theory.
The wreckage at the front is in much smaller pieces
than the rest of the plane.
If an aircraft comes down very steeply
at a very high rate of descent,
if it hits the surface of the water,
it's very, very nearly as... disastrous to the structure
as it would be if it were hit...
to hit the granite side of a mountain.
It hit with one...
The theory also explains how debris from the front of the plane
could have ended up towards the back,
or embedded in the body of a passenger.
And, why the cargo door had holes that bent inwards.
As the fuselage sides crumpled,
some of the windows would shatter.
The rivets and so forth from the outer skin
would be fired inwards, outwards, in all directions.
And that explained why there were all these fragments
embedded in seat cushions and bodies found in the very early stages.
But not all of the evidence supports Taylor's theory
that there was an explosion near the back of the plane.
He has no explanation for an obvious hole
near the front of the fuselage.
I don't get it. We need more evidence.
You can't just take a piece of information
of there's some pieces missing from the front
and just say that must mean this.
No, it doesn't, nothing is that obvious.
Investigators dig up the radar for another look.
Okay, now there's our flight 870.
They want to see for themselves
if there's any evidence of a fighter jet
in the vicinity of the plane.
Yeah, okay. Now eliminate the ones we think are just noise.
They discover there are many unidentified returns,
not just the 3 previously identified as a fighter jet.
Random or stray radar plots are not uncommon.
There are many, many other unexplained returns in the area,
but it so happened, probably,
that these were the only ones that sort of linked together
in, in...in, you know,
to make people think that they were another aircraft.
Taylor concludes
that what Macidull thought was another aircraft
is actually debris falling from Flight 870
as it breaks apart.
Well, I'll tell you what plane this is.
It's our plane.
And this is a piece of debris.
The investigation has reached an impasse.
Radar evidence of another jet has been discounted.
But there's still no proof of a bomb on board.
Then Frank Taylor notices
something odd near the back of the plane.
There are a number of small, crumpled pieces of debris
mixed in with areas that are nearly untouched.
Something's not right.
For Frank Taylor,
it's a sign the debris has been placed in the wrong location.
Basically, they just looked wrong.
The progression of damage from intense crumpling,
very small pieces to very large pieces
and then back to small pieces just did not make any sense at all.
One piece of wreckage stands out.
Those numbers. I've seen them somewhere else.
I came across quite a large piece of skin
which had got pencilled numbers
written on the inside, close to the stringers,
those are the horizontal stiffening pieces
that are on the fuselage.
I had never seen that piece before,
but I remembered somewhere
seeing another piece with pencilled numbers on.
I couldn't remember exactly where.
I had a rough idea, so I just went looking.
Gotcha!
Can you remove that piece for me please?
And eventually, I found it in the forward fuselage.
And the numbers ran consecutively
from the piece in the forward fuselage to the piece at the rear.
Okay.
A little bit further down. A little bit further down.
A little bit further.
That's it! That's where you belong.
Lovely.
Could you wire those in.
And that was the first bit.
And that, that gave us then total confidence that,
yeah, okay, good, this is going to work.
Once all the debris is checked and moved to the correct position,
evidence of a missile hit on the front of the aircraft is gone.
Well you could quite clearly see that
there'd been no explosion of a missile outside in the areas
that...previous commissions going right back to the early stages
had predicted.
The reassembled fuselage
reveals a new hole at the back of the plane.
It appears to have been caused by a bomb.
Let's have a look at what we've got.
Yes, well we know what that is.
Investigators study more wreckage from that part of the plane.
What have we got here?
Well, look at you.
The steel washbasin has been bent upwards by an explosion,
just what investigators would expect to see
if a bomb exploded in the rear lavatory.
The more we discovered,
the more they all pointed back to an explosion in the rear toilet area.
Taylor and his team finally have enough evidence
to say what brought down Itavia Flight 870.
I think it was a bomb.
There was no eureka moment.
I mean we just, from there it was a gradual...
it was just a gradual process of finding more evidence
and no contradictory evidence.
There's just one more test they need to do to be sure.
Okay. Let's blow it up and see what happens.
Okay. Let's do it.
Investigators place explosives inside a DC-9 lavatory
to test their theory that a bomb brought down Flight 870.
(3. 2. 1.)
If the shattered pieces match Flight 870's debris...
Okay, let's go see how we did.
it will provide strong evidence that they're right.
The explosion creates distinctive damage.
It's nearly identical to what was seen in the debris
from the lavatory of flight 870.
Okay, measure that one, will you? Yeah.
We were absolutely sure, yes, yes. There's no, no doubt.
The evidence can't reveal who planted the bomb,
but investigators now have a good idea where it was placed.
The bomb was probably small enough to hide inside the tissue holder,
or behind the washbasin.
You can put something in there.
You can reach around behind that and get closer to the aircraft skin.
Based on the physical evidence,
the aircraft's last radar return, and the location of debris,
investigators now have a clear picture
of flight 870's final moments.
Itavia 870,
(call back for descent.)
Thank you for everything.
We'll call you for descent.
870.
Guarda!
It was an explosion close to the pylon
of the right hand engine,
which caused the right hand engine to come off.
In less than 10 seconds, the plane breaks apart
and plunges into the sea.
In 1994, after 4 years of work,
Frank Taylor's team files its report.
For the first time since the disaster,
investigators claim to have indisputable evidence
that a bomb blew up flight 870.
Frank Taylor's team didn't reach any conclusions
except ones which were based on hard physical evidence.
There was no theorising going on.
Taylor's report is the last word
on the technical investigation of the Itavia tragedy.
But in Italy, his findings are overshadowed
by an ongoing judicial inquiry that has been consumed
with the missile theory since the beginning.
In Italy, really, the judiciary
just seem to be able to ride roughshod over whatever's happening.
What we were told that in effect that our report was useless.
The judiciary in Italy
just found Frank Taylor's findings inconvenient.
I don't think they ordered it not to be published.
They just made a decision that they wouldn't publish it.
Most Italians still believe in the missile theory,
despite scientific evidence to the contrary.
The public opinion was much more intrigued
by the possibility that there was a cover-up,
a military or political cover-up.
In 2013,
at a hearing to assign financial liability for the accident,
the Italian Supreme Court rules
that a missile of unknown origin shot down flight 870
and orders the government to pay 100 million Euros
to the victims' families.
The ruling is a relief to the families,
but leaves some wondering if important evidence was ignored.
I'm sorry
but Italy is a dreadful place to have an aviation accident.
If you want the truth,
you're less likely to find it there
than just about anywhere else in the world.
For air accident investigator Frank Taylor,
the evidence speaks for itself.
We discovered quite clearly
that somebody had planted a bomb there.
But nobody on the legal side, it would appear, believed us
and therefore, so far as we are aware,
there has been no proper search for who did it,
why they did it or anything else.
As an engineer and an investigator,
I, I cannot see why anybody
would want to consider anything, anything other than the truth.