Italy court closes case of 1980 plane explosion

ROME, Jan 12 (Reuters) A Rome court has definitively closed the case of a mysterious plane explosion that killed 81 people in 1980 and has divided Italians ever since.

Italy's highest appeals court on Wednesday upheld an acquittal handed down in 2004 of two former air force generals who had been accused of giving false information about the disaster, which occurred on June 27, 1980.

The court's decision means the case is closed and the question of who and what was responsible for the crash will likely never be answered.

Yesterday, La Stampa newspaper of Turin, reflecting the opinion of many Italians, said closing the case left Italy's judicial system burdened with ''a massacre with no one guilty''.

The prosecution in the 2004 trial said the plane went down in a ''war-like scenario''.

But numerous investigations in the past 26 years have failed to determine whether the plane, a DC-9 of the now-defunct domestic airline Itavia, was blown apart by a bomb or a missile.

It broke up over the southern Mediterranean near the small southern island of Ustica, whose name has since become synonymous with the mysterious incident.

During investigations, documents disappeared and air traffic voice recordings were found to have either been erased or tampered with.

Media reports based on radar monitoring data said fighter aircraft from several NATO nations were in the area at the time of the crash, possibly following a Libyan MIG that was trying to evade radar control by flying close to the civilian plane.

Another theory was that the plane entered a military exercise area and was hit by a missile launched by a fighter that had mistaken it for an enemy intruder.

Most Italians believe the cause of the crash, which has been the subject of one film and numerous books, was covered up for security or military reasons.

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