According to a former insider of the Italian secret service (SISMI), Francesco Pazienza, “Italy could not escape from the Nato obligations and thus had to sign an agreement with Malta to protect it in case of an attack by Colonel Gaddafi. This agreement was signed and Gaddafi avenged himself.”

According to Pazienza, who recently gave an interview to Milena Gabanelli that was published in La Repubblica, this is what led to the terrorist attack at the railway station of Bologna on 2 August 1980 and also to the disappearance of an Alitalia plane over Ustica some time earlier.

Pazienza added that no one in the Italian government wanted to blame Libya for the terrorist attack at that time, as there were heavy Italian interests in Libya such as Fiat and Eni, but just two days after the attack Senator Giovanni Spadolini (later a foreign minister) attributed the Bologna massacre in which 86 people were killed to Middle Eastern origins. He also claims that it was also for this reason that the Italian secret service placed a luggage full of the same explosive as that used at Bologna on a train going from Taranto to Milan in January 1981, which did not explode, so that public opinion would think the terrorist attack came from somewhere else.

He has just finished serving 12 years in prison for his involvement with Licio Gelli and the P2 network of secret services, high finance, the Mafia and the Vatican.

In the same interview he also revealed that the Vatican, at that time under Pope John Paul II, had sent $4 million-worth of gold ingots to the Solidarnosc strikers at Gdansk in April 1981 by means of a Polish priest who hid the ingots in a false bottom of a Lada he drove from Trieste to Gdansk.