“He didn’t kill himself.” Francesca Donato, the MEP elected in Strasbourg with the League in 2019 and then moved to the Christian Democrats, continues to repeat it. It was she who found the body of her husband Angelo Onorato, an architect and owner of a furniture shop, after hours of apprehension because the man did not respond to her messages and calls. She, together with her youngest daughter, tracked him down thanks to the smartphone’s tracker. The man was now lifeless, aboard the Range Rover, parked along Viale Regione Siciliana Nord Ovest, an artery parallel to the Palermo-Mazara del Vallo motorway where there are warehouses, businesses and a few homes. Investigators are currently keeping both hypotheses open, that of suicide and that of murder. The forensic police set up a tent near the crime scene to continue investigations on site, looking for fingerprints and traces with luminol. The police are also following the road in reverse to find out if there are any video cameras that have recorded the Range Rover along the route followed by the entrepreneur. Donato and his daughter Carolina are in the flying squad offices waiting to be interviewed by the investigators to reconstruct the man’s movements.
Suspicions about the appointment
The first rumors spoke of wounds on the body caused by gunshots. A circumstance, however, that she would have been denied by the investigators. A spot of blood was found on Onorato’s body at chest level, on the right side of the chest. This would have dripped from his mouth, according to investigators who thus explain why it was initially suspected that the man had been killed by gunshots. The man’s body was found lifeless in a street parallel to via Ugo La Malfa, towards Mazara del Vallo, where he was supposed to meet a person. Onorato himself had told his wife that he would have to meet someone from Capaci. To some friends who called her, the MEP confirmed: “They killed my husband Angelo.” According to Sicilian newspaperSince this morning at 11 am, Donato has been insistently looking for her husband from whom he no longer had any answers to messages and calls. Until she spotted him by following the car’s GPS signal. And then the tragic discovery with the arrival of the police, warned by some passers-by.
The witness
One of the witnesses heard by the investigators said that at 3.15pm he saw «the door of the Range Rover open and two people screaming. It seemed to me there was someone who had fallen ill. The man was on the driver’s side and had a zip tie around his neck and some blood on his shirt.” The man then said he walked away when he saw the blood.
Who is Angelo Onorato
Onorato, 54 years old, born in August 1969, was originally from Palermo and was the owner of Casa – Ambienti per la vita, a home furnishings shop in Viale Strasburgo. Since 1999 he had been married to MEP Francesca Donato, elected in Strasbourg with the League in 2019 – after a first attempt with the same party in 2014 but as an independent – with over 28 thousand preferences. Two years later he leaves the League and ends up in the non-member group. He then founded the civic list Rinascita Repubblicana and Rinascita Palermo, with which he presented himself in the municipal elections of the Sicilian capital, obtaining 3 percent of the vote. In the years of the pandemic and the lockdown, has often been close to the No Vax and No Geen Pass demands. Salvatore Cuffaro’s move to New Sicily Christian Democracy takes place at the beginning of 2023 and she is then appointed party commissioner in Sardinia. Donato is a lawyer and originally from Ancona. She was the same age as her husband, she had moved to Palermo after her marriage and here the family has expanded with two children, aged 25 and 21. She is not a candidate in the European elections in June.
