The death of the Palermo businessman Angelo Onorato, 54, husband of the MEP and deputy secretary of the Christian Democrats Francesca Donato, is still shrouded in mystery. It was his wife who found the body inside her green Range Rover parked on the slip road towards Trapani on viale Regione Siciliana northwest. One of the few certain points in this tragedy is that Onorato died suffocated by an electrician’s zip tie tied around his neck. A white plastic string. Whether it was a murder or a suicide will be established by the investigators of the Flying Squad, led by Marco Basile and coordinated by the deputy prosecutor Ennio Petrigni.
The body of the architect, well known in Palermo, was found in the driving seat, with the seat belt still fastened and his head thrown forward. In the car everything is in order, there are no signs of a struggle nor of a robbery that ended in blood. The only anomaly was that one of the rear doors was found ajar, as if a second person had climbed into the rear seats and may have tightened the strap around the victim’s neck.
However, the medical examiner does not exclude that it was the victim herself who passed the plastic string around her neck and then tightened it by pulling the end of the strap outwards. The autopsy will try to clarify the death. He will also have to establish the time of death. The family knew that Onorato had an appointment with a person from Capaci, a municipality on the north coast of Palermo. But not where the meeting would have taken place. And the investigators also suspect that it may have been an excuse invented by Onorato.
To clarify this last point, investigative insights into the victim’s phone will be fundamental: the latest calls, chats and messages received and sent. Even the location of the discovery raised a thousand doubts: it is an isolated area, next to the motorway, without cameras and without meeting points. The ideal place to lure the victim into a trap, but also to make an extreme gesture in solitude. Definitely not a place to meet a person for business.
