Edoardo Agnelli

Edoardo Agnelli (9 June 1954 – 15 November 2000), also known as Mahdi Agnelli, was the eldest child and only son of Gianni Agnelli, the industrialist patriarch of Fiat S.p.A., and of Marella Agnelli, who was born Donna Marella Caracciolo di Castagneto. He converted to Islam when he was living in New York City, and changed his name; he ultimately converted to Shia Islam in the 90s. In mid-November 2000, he was found dead under a bridge on the outskirts of Turin. and had one sister, Margherita.

After leaving Princeton, Agnelli traveled to Kenya, Iran, and India, where he met Sathya Sai Baba and pursued his interest in Eastern religions and mysticism. For his anti-capitalist and religious views, including criticism of capitalism in an interview following the Peace March of Assisi, he was seen as a rebel and a heretic. According to La Repubblica, Agnelli's preoccupations became increasingly erratic, lecturing about mysticism, Franciscanism, and Buddhism, praising of the poor, and criticizing the behavior of the family business, Fiat. According to The Guardian, his views opposed to economic materialism made him move in a different direction than his parents.

As an adult, Agnelli was being groomed to be the heir apparent to the Fiat empire. In the night of 27 October 1986, he made public his disagreement with his father and proclaimed himself ready to take "all the responsibilities that belong to the ownership of a large group like ours"; In doing so, he continued the tradition of the Fiat-owner family dating back to the 1920s. In this capacity, he was present at the Heysel disaster. In 1990, he was accused for heroin possession in Malindi; the charges were later dropped.

Conversion to Islam Agnelli converted to Sunni Islam in an Islamic centre in New York where he was named Hisham Aziz. According to Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri Abyaneh, Agnelli recited his shahada in front of Fakhreddin Hejazi, became a Shia Muslim, and changed his name to Mahdi.

Death On 15 November 2000, 46-year-old Agnelli's body was found near Turin, on a river bed beneath a motorway viaduct on which his car was found. According to a report by Marco Ellena, the doctor from the public health office of nearby city Cuneo, who examined Agnelli's body, said: "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 father joined police at the scene; he was reported to not have cried once he learned about Agnelli's death, but was devastated.

Giuseppe Puppo, an Italian journalist and writer, published a book about Agnelli'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 Agnelli, whose images have never been released; the telephone traffic on the two phones; the total absence of witnesses along a road section that recorded at least eight cars per minute at that time; the lack of fingerprints on the car; and the hurried burial without a proper autopsy. He was buried next to his cousin, Giovanni Alberto Agnelli, in his family vault in the cemetery perched above the grounds of the Agnelli family villa at Villar Perosa.