ROME — When the body of an Asian woman washed up in the Italian port of Rimini last weekend, investigators thought they’d finally moved a step close to solving a murder.
The remains were found inside a blue suitcase floating in the sea.
At first glance, the woman matched the description of a 36-year-old Chinese lady who went missing from a cruise ship earlier this year, the Daily Beast reported.
Yinglei Li, better known as Angie Li, has not been seen since February, when she disappeared from a family cruise vacation.
Before her disappearance, Li was married to 45-year-old German IT consultant Daniel Belling, and they lived in Ireland with their two sons, aged 6 and 4.
The family boarded the 11-day cruise on Feb. 9 at a port near Rome, bound for Malta, Greece and Cyprus.
The next day, the owner of a souvenir shop in Genoa said she saw Belling shout at Li for wearing garish sandals, then hand her a pair of sneakers. The witness said Li seemed shaken by the incident. She hasn’t been seen since.
Belling and the children ate alone for the rest of the trip. He even told staff not to makeup the foldout bed in their cabin as the family were all sleeping together in one bed.
The cruise ended on Feb. 20. Later that day, Belling was arrested at the airport in Rome when he tried to fly home with the kids. He hadn’t told anyone his wife was missing.
Belling told investigators he thought Li may have gone to Ireland or even back to China — claiming she had done it before and often threatened to leave him.
Li’s parents say she is not in China.
Belling is being held by Italian investigators. So when the body in the suitcase showed up in Rimini, the cops thought they’d got their man. But the woman was 5 inches taller than Li, had longer hair and was much thinner. It was an Asian woman, alright. But it wasn’t her.
So now Italy has two mysteries to solve, and no one is any close to finding out what happened to Angie Li.
