The husband of the Italian member of the European Parliament Francesca Donato was found dead in Palermo on Saturday, victim of an apparent homicide. Donato has been one of the most vociferous critics in the European Parliament of Covid response measures like mass vaccination and “green passes”, as well as many other flagship EU policies. Her husband, the architect Angelo Onorato, was found dead in the driver seat of his car with a plastic strap wrapped around his neck and a blood stain on his shirt – “probably caused by the violent coughing and gagging which accompany suffocation”, according to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
Donato was one of a small group of dissident members of the European Parliament who opposed the EU’s Covid response: in particular, mass vaccination with experimental vaccines and the ‘green pass’ vaccination certificates which were used throughout the EU to bring it about by discriminating against the unvaccinated. She has also opposed the EU and, more generally, Western financial and material support for the Ukrainian war effort and called for peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.
She was also one of the very few eurodeputies – even in the Covid dissident group – to have voted against the Digital Services Act: the European Commission’s signature censorship law, which was instrumentalised to target Covid dissidents even before its passage and which has had a chilling effect on free speech worldwide. In 2013, one year before she first ran for a seat in the European Parliament and six years before being elected, she even founded a ‘Eurexit Project’ calling for Italy to leave the eurozone.
Onorato was found dead on Saturday afternoon by Donato herself and the couple’s 21 year-old daughter Carolina. According to reports in the Italian press, Francesca and Carolina had gone looking for him after he failed to respond to their telephone calls, locating his body thanks to the location tracker on his iPhone. Both mother and daughter have responded with dismay to suggestions that Onorato, despite his apparent death by strangulation, might somehow have committed suicide.
“My father was killed,” Carolina is reported to have written on social media. “Let no one dare say or even just think that he committed suicide.”
In a post on her X account on Monday Donato wrote:
I am going through the most difficult and devastating moments of my life. The pain is unimaginable. I’m asking everyone to refrain from speculations about the causes of my husband’s death. There are investigations underway, let’s let the police do its work.
Robert Kogon is the pen name of a widely-published journalist covering European affairs. Subscribe to his Substack.
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