Rabat – New developments have emerged in the long-standing investigation surrounding the death of Imane Fadil, a Moroccan model who was a key witness in Berlusconi’s Bunga-Bunga Trial.
In March 2019, Italian magistrates opened a murder investigation following the mysterious death of Imane Fadil. The Moroccan model had presented evidence in court against former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi during the infamous Bunga-Bunga Trial.
Berlusconi was accused of paying for sex with an underage sex worker. But the court acquitted Berlusconi in 2015 on the grounds that he did not know the real age of Karima El Mahroug, a then-17-year-old teenage girl.
Fadil lost her life on March 1, 2019, while working on a memoir that threatened to reveal more damning evidence against Berlusconi. The model spent a month in a hospital in Milan, suffering from an undiagnosed serious illness.
In September 2019, the investigations into Fadil’s death concluded that she suffered from bone marrow aplasia associated with acute hepatitis, an extremely rare and serious disease.
In a recent development, the judge for preliminary investigations, Alessandra Cecchelli, rejected the request for dismissal of the case by the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office. The judge has set “a deadline of six months” for the completion of further investigations into the death of Imane Fadil. The new investigations will aim, in particular, to determine whether medical error was the main cause of death.
The team of experts, commissioned by the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office, explained that the therapeutic choices the doctors made did not align with Fadil’s diagnosis. The course for treatment could possibly be the cause of a gastroesophageal hemorrhage that led to the death of Imane Fadil.
The lawyer who represents Fadil’s family, Mirko Mazzali, had asked the court to open an investigation into medical mistreatment against the doctors at the Milan Humanitas Clinic.
On January 2, judge Cecchelli accepted the lawyer’s appeal with reference to the need for further investigation through specific expert evaluation on whether it was a predictable and avoidable medical complication that led to the death of Imane Fadil.
