Edoardo Agnelli was the eldest child and only son of Marella Agnelli and Gianni Agnelli, the industrialist patriarch of Fiat. He converted to Islam when he was living in New York City, and changed his name to "Mahdi". In mid-November 2000, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances under a bridge on the outskirts of Turin.
Life
Agnelli was born in New York City to Italian parents. His mother, Marella Agnelli, and his father, Gianni Agnelli, married in 1953. Edoardo Agnelli had one sister, Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen. He had studied at Atlantic College, and he read modern literature and oriental philosophy at Princeton University. After leaving Princeton, he traveled in India, pursuing his interest in oriental religion and mysticism, and Iran. According to La Repubblica, Agnelli's preoccupations became increasingly erratic, lecturing about Mysticism, Franciscanism, and Buddhism, praising of the poor, and criticism of the behavior of Fiat. He was against materialism which made him move in a different direction than his parents, according to The Guardian. As an adult, Agnelli claimed to be the heir apparent to the Fiat empire, but his father, who had already been unhappy with Edoardo's conversion to Islam, ensured that he would not inherit it. The only official position which the younger Agnelli held in the family businesses was as a director of Juventus F.C., in which capacity he was present at the Heysel disaster. In 1990, he was accused for heroin possession but the charges were later dropped.
Converting to Islam
Edoardo Agnelli converted to Sunni Islam in an Islamic center in New York where he was named "Hisham Aziz". Then he met Ayatollah Khomenei in Iran and was reported to have converted to Shia Islam. According to Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri Abyaneh, Agnelli declared faith to Fakhroddein Hejazi and became a Shia Muslim and was named "Mahdi". He said, "One day while I was in New York, I was walking in a library and Quran caught my glimpse. I was curious about what was in it. I started reading it in English and I felt that those words were holy words and cannot be the words of men. I was really touched and borrowed the book and studied it further and I felt like I was understanding it and I believed it."
Death
In 15 November 2000, 46-year-old Agnelli's body was found near Turin, on a river bed beneath a motorwayviaduct on which his car was found. The viaduct is known as the bridge of suicides. According to a report by Marco Ellena, the doctor from the public health office of nearby city Cuneo, who examined Edoardo's body, "He died because of deadly wounds after having fallen 80 meters". The report also stated that he was alive when his body impacted with the ground. His head, face and chest were damaged due to the fall and an autopsy detected some internal injuries which seemed to prove the suicide theory. Nothing was unusual in his death scene and police did not find anything in his car apart from phones, cigarettes, a walking stick, an address book and a bottle of water. His conversion to Islam and the therefore fast process of his funeral started some rumors about his suicide. Finally, Riccardo Bausone, the public prosecutor who was working on Edoardo's case, closed the death case and concluded that Agnelli's death was a suicide case. Giuseppe Puppo, a journalist, an Italian journalist and writer, published a book about Angelli's death in 2009, using interviews and unpublished testimonies. Puppo regards some of the points as inconsistencies and oddities: the absence of the bodyguards of Edoardo Agnelli; the interval of two hours between leaving home and arriving on the Fossano viaduct; the cameras of Edoardo Agnelli, whose images have never been released; the telephone traffic on the two phones; the total absence of witnesses along a road section which recorded at least eight cars per minute at that time; the lack of fingerprints on the car; the hurried burial without a proper autopsy. Edoardo was buried next his cousin Giovannino in his family vault, in the cemetery perched above the grounds of the Agnelli family villa.
