Italian police have arrested six people for trafficking in
defective Airbus spare parts that are suspected
of causing the November 12 American Airlines crash in
Queens, New York, in which 265 people died.
Officers of the Italian Finance Police, working in conjunction
with the FBI, checked over six aging Airbus A300s that were
parked in a hangar at Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome.
Officers said the planes had been dismantled for spare parts
by an Italian company, Panaviation, to sell to American,
Canadian and other airlines, using false documentation
claiming they were airworthy. Police have seized three
container loads of aircraft spare parts in Naples that
Panaviation was shipping to the United States for sale.
The six Airbuses seized by the police had been sold to
Panaviation by the Italian national airline Alitalia in 1992, and
were due to be demolished as obsolete. When police, acting
on a tip from an informer, broke into Hangar No 8 at Leonardo
da Vinci airport, they found that the aircraft had been
stripped partially for spare parts, some of which were in
containers packed ready for export to the U.S., while other
parts were lying on the ground.
The multimillion-dollar scam came to light after an
investigation of another plane crash, at Christopher Colombus
airport in Genoa on February 25, 1999, in which four people
died. The FBI is examining documents from Panaviation seized
by Italian police that are linked to the American Airlines
disaster, while Italian magistrates are studying other
documents that are linked to the crash at Genoa.
This scam may also be linked to the theft of jet electronic
equipment worth several million dollars from a Meridiana airline
hangar at a Sardinian airport in 1993. Several months after
the theft, the equipment was found to have been sold with
an authentic airworthiness certificate. Police believe the
certificate was used as a model for creating the fraudulent
documentation that Panaviation issued later to cover the sale
of obsolete parts.
Airlines faced with fewer fares and less revenue after
September 11 have increasingly been tempted to cut costs
by buying spare parts of dubious provenance.
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