The death occurred due to suffocation, the body was found in his car, inside which there were no traces of a struggle. Two leads remain open at the moment on the circumstances that led to the death of Angelo Onorato, one of Palermo’s best-known entrepreneurs, husband of the MEP and deputy secretary of the DC Francesca Donato: suicide or murder. Initial investigations had led the police to lean towards the first hypothesis, but family and friends ruled out the possibility.
We read in Repubblica:
The first policemen to arrive find the car in perfect order: the businessman still has his seat belt and his glasses clipped to his shirt. The wallet and cell phone are in the glove compartment. «Possible suicide», is the first hypothesis of the investigators of the flying squad directed by Marco Basile. But the back door of the Range Rover is open, there are fingerprints on the inside handle. The question immediately arises: “What if someone, from behind, had tightened that band around the entrepreneur’s neck?”.
Honored yes he was sent away from home saying he had an appointment with someone from Capaci. It was his wife and daughter who found the body, following the satellite tracks of his cell phone, worried after no longer receiving news from him.
His wife whispers to the police: “Lately he has been worried, sometimes he seemed downright desperate.” But for what? His wife doesn’t know this exactly, but a friend who arrived in Viale Regione Siciliana says: “He had a lot of debts.” And once again it’s everything and the opposite of everything. Was Angelo Onorato perhaps worried about the threats of someone who wanted his money soon? Or was he crushed by the weight of those economic difficulties?
It cannot be a suicide for those who knew him and had seen him that same day. “Nothing suggested a desperate gesture,” his factotum tells Repubblica. “He seemed calm to me,” says a friend with whom he met that morning.
The first thing the medical examiner notes is the position of the body, that of a “man sitting driving the car”. An annotation that would make one think of the hypothesis of suicide, because if someone had strangled him from behind, Onorato would have tried to move nervously, perhaps he would have even tried to unhook his seat belt. And yet, none of this happened. Thus, at the end of the inspection, the medical examiner writes of a “death due to suffocation”.
