Alitalia customers at Sofia Airport will be unpleasantly surprised to find out that the company's flights to Rome on September 17 had been cancelled.

The company would cancel a total of 40 flights from and to Amsterdam, Belgrade, Bucharest, Kiev, Lisbon, Madrid, Milan, Nice, Paris, Sofia and Verona, which were to be serviced between 12am and 4pm Central European Summer Time, Alitalia said in a statement on its website late on the evening of September 16. The flights were cancelled because of a strike, the statements said, without giving further details.

Earlier in the day, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi said that the fate of the company would be decided in the 48 hours to follow. Berlusconi's statement came up at a time when trade unions and Alitalia's management were still negotiating on the fate of the staff at the struggling airline. Bankruptcy could leave a large part of Alitalia's nearly 20 000 employees jobless.

However, the International Herald Tribune (IHT) quoted the prime minister as saying that "workers should not expect generous benefits if the bankrupt national airline fails."

According to Italian news agency Ansa, there were two bidders for the carrier, Italian ItAli Airlines and Investimenti e Sviluppo Mediterraneo SpA (Mediterranean Investment and Development).

Italian government, which owns a 49.9 per cent stake in the carrier, declared Alitalia's bankruptcy on August 29, thus aiming to seek protection from creditors and re-launch the airline by taking over profitable assets by Italian investors and merger Alitalia with the smaller airline Air One, likely with a foreign carrier taking a minority stake, IHT said.

Air France-KLM was interested in buying the Italian flag carrier, but withdrew its offer at the last moment, shaking again Alitalia's stability.