The cell phone of Francesca Deidda, who was killed with a hammer by her husband Igor Sollai on May 10 last year, was not thrown into the sea, just as the one-kilo mallet used to hit the woman on the head was not thrown from the Scafa bridge in Cagliari, while she was resting on the sofa in their home in San Sperate. Investigators are convinced of this, not only because divers searched the seabed of Santa Gilla without finding anything, but also because the 42-year-old's cell phone suddenly turned on again, for 7 and a half hours, in September, when the truck driver had already been in prison for two months and kept repeating that his wife had left home spontaneously.
Last login
The phone had been turned off for the last time on May 31, just when Igor Sollai had learned that Francesca's brother had filed a missing person report with the police. The woman had vanished into thin air on May 10, had suddenly resigned via the online procedure and no one had heard from her again: every now and then someone, friends and family, received messages from her cell phone in which she repeated that she had left, leaving everything and everyone. From the end of May, the cell phone had not been turned back on, until 3.40 on September 5, when Igor Sollai was already in prison in Uta (he was arrested on July 4). For about 7 and a half hours, until 11.11 in the morning, the phone remained on and connected to a repeater in Piazza Santa Lucia in Assemini that covers both part of the town and the countryside, near a railway overpass. Then it turned off again and, from that moment on, nothing more.
The research
Despite the searches of the Carabinieri, the cell phone was not found. The military of the ROS and those of the Iglesias Company have ruled out that the cell phone was in the hands of any relative of the suspect or his lover: they were all intercepted and it was verified that they were far from the repeater in Piazza Santa Lucia. But that mysterious reactivation has in fact denied a part of Sollai's confession, which came in November after six months in which he professed to be completely innocent of the accusations, despite a mountain of clues and evidence that the investigators had collected so much that they managed - following the GPS of his work van - to also recover the body of the 42-year-old, closed in a bag and thrown in the woods between Sinnai and San Vito, along the former Orientale (state road 125).
The mystery
Francesca Deidda was killed the night she disappeared, but her remains were only recovered on July 18. After six months of pre-trial detention, when the Court of Cassation also confirmed the serious evidence, Igor Sollai decided to confess, saying that he had thrown both the murder weapon and his wife's cell phone out of the window of his van in Santa Gilla. The divers of the Carabinieri sent to search the seabed of Santa Gilla found nothing and, given the weight of the two objects (the bricklayer's mallet used to kill her was almost a kilo), it seems impossible that the current could have carried them away. And then that mysterious switching on of the cell phone for 7 and a half hours, with the connection to the Assemini cell: an event that could never have occurred if the device had been underwater. But why lie after having confessed and confirmed almost everything that the Prosecutor's Office had already discovered?
The investigative hypothesis
The investigators' hypothesis is that the truck driver got rid of his wife's cell phone by throwing it off a bridge, but not the Scafa one: rather, the railway overpass on Via Olimpia in Assemini, surrounded by vegetation on both sides. Someone at that point could have found it at night and turned it on to see if it was working, only to then turn it off again due to the battery being flat. According to the technical investigations carried out by the Prosecutor's Office, it is likely that there was still enough charge (even after three months of inactivity) to turn it back on. Not only that. It then emerged that Francesca's cell phone did not have a pin code, so anyone could have found it and turned it back on. All possible reports to the investigators, in this sense, will naturally be taken into consideration.
Francis Pinna
