New evidence in longstanding trial suggests that a 34-year-old model may have been poisoned to prevent disclosure of damning information for defendant’s political reputation.

Rabat – New elements in the “mysterious death” of Moroccan-born model Iman Fadil have suggested that the woman did not die of a natural death, implying she may have been poisoned.

Italian magistrates have opened a murder investigation to shed further light on Fadil’s death, Italian outlet ANSA reported yesterday.

Fadil is believed to have felt some degree of strangeness in her actions and sense of being prior to her death. She told her brother and lawyer that she had been poisoned, according to ANSA.

Fadil’s brother and lawyer later revealed that she died “after a month of agony,” the newspaper added.

Killed to be silenced

The preliminary results of the ongoing murder investigation appear to buttress Fadil’s claims. A toxicology test has established that the former model died of “a mixture of radioactive substances,” local reports have concurred.

Fadil, who was a key witness in the “bunga-bunga trial” involving former Italian Prime Minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, was due to give evidence against Berlusconi.

In the wake of the bunga-bunga trial, also known as the “Ruby affair,” Berlusconi had pleaded not guilty. He accused critics of using the affair to further tarnish his then-suffering political reputation.

The court initially 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 who was part of the cohort of strippers whom Fadil claimed were paid into having sex with Berlusconi and his entourage.

Fadil has maintained over the years that the trial that acquitted Berlusconi had missed the true extent of his involvement in the abusing and silencing of the “bunga-bunga girls.”

Part of the new evidence suggests that Fadil may have been poisoned to prevent her from giving damming evidence against Berlusconi, who she claimed gave many of the girls enormous sums of money, threatening them to keep silent.

According to Huffington Post Italy, Fadil had been working on a memoir when she died.

Titled “I met the devil,” the book gives first-hand accounts of parts of the episodes that have not yet come to light in the Ruby affair, according to the newspaper.

Huffington Post Italy cited parts of the unpublished memoir as reading: “Everything started when I was 25. I am 34 now. I have always told the truth and I have rejected countless corruption attempts from Berlusconi and his entourage.”

Meanwhile, Berlusconi is adamant that Fadil’s story is a fabrication. “I have never known Iman Fadil,” the former Italian PM has been quoted as maintaining.

Magistrates await the complete results of the ongoing murder investigation to deliberate on the credibility of the new evidence appearing to incriminate Berlusconi.