Father of two arrested after wife disappears during luxury Mediterranean cruise

A father of two will appear before judges on Friday following his arrest on suspicion of murder after his wife disappeared from a luxury Mediterranean cruise.

Daniel Belling, 45, was arrested earlier this week at Rome’s Ciampino airport as he was about to board a Ryanair flight to Dublin with his two young children.

He and his Chinese-born wife, Li Yinglei, together with their children aged six and four, were on an 11-day cruise around the Mediterranean when she disappeared.

She has not been seen or heard from since. The cruise began on February 9 in the Italian port of Civitavecchia, north of Rome, and took them to Malta, Greece and Cyprus. 

When the passenger liner, the MSC Magnifica, arrived back in Civitavecchia on February 20, Mr Belling’s 36-year-old wife was nowhere to be found.  He allegedly failed to tell the ship’s crew that his wife, who had adopted the English name Angie, was missing, a fact which aroused the suspicions of Italian police. 

German by nationality, he worked as an IT consultant in Ireland, where his clients included Apple. The last time she was seen alive was in Genoa on February 10, just one day into the cruise, when the family went into a tourist souvenir shop.

“I remember it well, we had just opened and it was 10am. First she entered with the two children, then he came in. He was agitated, he pulled out of a rucksack a pair of gym shoes and yelled at the woman. He said ‘Put these on instead of your sandals and shut up,’” the owner told La Stampa newspaper.

Cruise ship records show that Ms Li returned aboard the Magnifica after the outing in Genoa, meaning she disappeared between then and the end of the cruise, either at sea or in one of the vessel’s destinations.  Her absence was only noticed when she failed to leave the ship at the end of the cruise on Monday.

Maritime authorities alerted the police, who eventually traced Mr Belling to Ciampino airport, bound for Dublin.  He was arrested and remanded in custody in Regina Coeli prison in Rome.

“I can’t say anything about the circumstances of his wife’s disappearance until he appears in front of the judges tomorrow,” Luigi Conti, his lawyer, told The Telegraph. “He is keen to speak to the judges, to explain what happened. His behaviour after disembarking was not that of a person who was trying to flee. He simply headed to Ciampino airport with his children to catch the flight that he had booked when he first organised the cruise.”

The couple’s children have been placed in the temporary care of Italian social services. A cruise ship passenger said she had seen Mr Belling and his children on board the ship on several occasions. 

“They were always scruffy and bare-footed, always wearing the same clothes,” she told “Chi l’ha Visto?” (Who Saw Them?), an Italian television programme about missing persons cases. “Then we saw them at Ciampino airport, but the mother was no longer with them.”