A US military jury in North Carolina yesterday acquitted Richard Ashby, a marine captain who was piloting the Navy 'Prowler' jet that sliced through cables at a ski-resort in a valley near Cavalese in the Italian Alps on February 3 last year.

Captain Ashby's family cheered in the courthouse at Camp Lejeune marine base when the jury, after seven hours of deliberation, found the accused not guilty on 20 counts of involuntary manslaughter and four other charges.

But in Italy, the emotion was violent anger, from all points of the political compass, putting the government on the defensive while striving desperately to preserve its traditional warm relations with Washington.

The prime minister, Massimo D'Alema, a former communist at the helm of a broadly based administration, astonished many of his followers with his initial reaction. Speaking in Boston on the eve of his first meeting with President Clinton since assuming the premiership five months ago, Mr D'Alema said: 'I don't comment on court verdicts in Italy, much less those in the United States'.

Asked if he intended raising the issue at the White House today, Mr D'Alema was quoted as saying : 'The president of the United States does not normally discuss verdicts. In the US, verdicts cannot be appealed to the political authorities.' As the outcry intensified in Italy, however, Mr D'Alema said had been 'stunned' by the outcome and would be raising the matter with Mr Clinton.

Back in Rome, one of his own junior defence ministers, Paola Guerrini, described the verdict as 'scandalous'.

Valdo Spini, a member of Mr D'Alema's Left Democrats and chairman of the defence committee of Italy's lower house, said he was 'bewildered and indignant'.He called the outcome 'a verdict that takes no account of the Italian authorities' ban on low-level flying and which fails to do justice to the victims of the accident'.

According to Romano Prodi, who was Italy's prime minister at the time of the tragedy, regulations in force since 1955 prohibited foreign aircraft from flying any lower than 2,000ft.

The cable at the Italian site was cut 370ft above the ground.

A senator in Silvio Berlusconi's right of centre Forza Italia ('Come on Italy') party, Francesca Scopelliti, asked: 'If the pilot is innocent, then who is guilty of the multiple killings ?'

The outcome also roused the nationalistic right, with Pino Rauti, of the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Fiamma Tricolore calling it 'shameful'.

Seven Germans, five Belgians, three Italians, two Poles, two Austrians and one Dutch tourist were killed in the acccident, which thrust the US military presence into Europe under renewed scrutiny.

After the court-martial judge, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Nunley, said the pilot was 'certainly free to go', the families of the victims walked out of the chamber in stricken silence. Afterwards, Capt Ashby, aged 31, said: 'My heart, my thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of this tragedy.' He would not answer questions.

'They do not understand the verdict,' said John Eaves, a lawyer for relatives of the German victims. 'If he's not responsible, who is?'

The prosecution had argued that Capt Ashby had been 'flat-hatting' - flying his electronic warfare Prowler recklessly in a display of 'Top Gun' bravado, when his wing sheared the cables. Flight recorders showed he had now only flown much lower but also much and faster than US military regulations allowed for the mission, codenamed 'Easy 01'. The limit was 517mph, but the jet was travelling at at 621mph.

Defence lawyers said the pilot was unaware of the restrictions. They pointed out that the cable was not marked on military maps, the Prowler's altimeter was not functioning properly and the pilot had suffered from an optical illusion that made the ground look further away than it was.

'All of a sudden', Captain Ashby said in his testimony: 'I saw this cable. It was as if somebody threw a baseball at your head, and it was already coming at me.'

Under cross-examination, he conceded that 'mistakes were made'. He admitted that he had not paid close attention to his radar equipment and acknowledged that many flight maps did not include every potential obstacle on the ground. But he insisted: 'There's a difference between responsibility and criminal responsibility'.

Frank Spinner, who led the defence said yesterday: 'This was a terrible, tragic training accident.' He criticised the US military establishment for pursuing the case. 'It's time for Congress to look at the Marine Corps once all these issues have been resolved and look at what went wrong,' he said. Capt Ashby had complained during his testimony that he had been 'nit-picked to death' by the corps.

The navigator, Joseph Schweitzer, still faces a trial on the same charges. His lawyers said the pilot's acquittal paved the way for his own.

Both marines had removed a video-cassette taped during the fatal flight, in what the prosecution described as a cover-up. Mr Spinner said the navigator had not been able to get the camera to work and believed there was nothing on the tape.

After the accident, numerous local people came forward to say that apparently dangerous low-level flying was common in the area, which has several ski resorts. Mauro Gilmozzi, the mayor of Cavalese, said the sentence signified that 'killing 20 people means absolutely nothing'.

A US military jury acquitted Captain Ashby, right, of being responsible for the deaths of 20 passengers in a cable car that dropped more than 300ft to the valley floor, left, when its line was cut by the jet he was piloting in the Italian Alps

Relatives want more compensation

The end of the court martial leaves a huge problem unresolved: relatives of the victims have received only token compensation and their fight to get more could take a decade or longer, writes John Hooper in Rome.

Following the disaster, the United States government gave the relatives $5,000 (£3,125) each to cover their immediate costs and the Italian government paid them 100 million lire (about £37,000) for each life lost - three-quarters of this payment being reimbursed by Washington.

Lawyers for the families are pressing for much more. But the US is on firm legal ground. Under Nato agreements, anyone seeking damages for an accident has initially to make the claim to the state in which the accident took place.

Italian courts are so slow, however, that the families' legal representatives fear they may have to wait 10 years or more for compensation. They and their clients have been pressing Washington to make a magnanimous gesture.

Last month Sindy Renkewitz from Germany, who lost two of her family in the accident, wrote a letter to President Clinton asking whether America had 'forgotten about this tragedy and about our families'. She asked for an assurance that 'America will value the life of my father and my sister at more than the value of a cable car'.

The representative of seven German families who lost people in the tragedy says they deserve more than £3 million per victim.

The Americans have paid out $20 million (£12.5 million) for material damage to the people of the valley in which the accident occurred. The money has been used to build a ski lift to replace the cable car line wrecked last year. It opened quietly in late January.

The money to build the ski lift came from a congressional appropriation. But one congressman's attempt to get another $60 million put in for the relatives failed.