A PROSECUTOR in Rome has opened an inquiry into the death of Italy’s most famous porn actress on the suspicion that it was faked to hide her links to “a top politician”.

Moana Pozzi was reported to have died of liver cancer eleven years ago in France at the age of 33. She is said to have had leukaemia as a child. However, Attilio Pisani, the prosecutor, said there were “many flaws and inconsistencies” in the official version of her death.

His decision to reopen the case follows the publication this summer of Moana: A Political Mystery, a biography by Brunetto Fantauzzi, the former head of her fan club. The case has been taken up by Coisuc, the Italian consumer association, which lodged a formal request for an investigation. Pozzi’s bestselling memoirs, The Philosophy of Moana, published in 1991, referred to relationships with famous men, without naming them. She made her film debut in 1985 in Federico Fellini’s Ginger and Fred. She modelled for Karl Lagerfeld in Milan, and in 1992 stood for Parliament, unsuccessfully, for the Love Party.

Il Messaggero, a daily newspaper in Rome, said that she had also become involved with “some of the country’s most powerful men”. Ennio Biasciucci, the head of Coisuc, said that Pozzi was said to have died at a clinic in Lyons in September 1994, but “nobody saw the body apart from her mother and sister”. No one had seen the urn containing her ashes, and no officials at the Lyons clinic had confirmed her presence there. The hospital had no facilities for cremation at the time, and her cremation had not been registered with the Italian authorities as required by law.

He said that the family first claimed to have scattered the ashes, then that they had been interred in a cemetery at Lerma, a village in Piedmont. No plaque marked the spot and the authorities in Rome had not received a death certificate until seven months later.

Signor Fantauzzi said one theory was that Pozzi had faked her death to leave her old life and make a fresh start. “Just before she died Moana told me she wanted to stop being a porn star altogether but was very worried . . . because she was at the centre of a huge money-making business.”

Il Giornale, the paper owned by the family of Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, said that Pozzi had many “secret liaisons with top politicans, actors, sportsmen and businessmen”.

La Stampa noted that her death in 1994 coincided with the turbulent realignment of Italian politics after the collapse of Christian Democracy in the “clean hands” anti-corruption drive, with Signor Berlusconi, a television tycoon, and Romano Prodi, an economics professor, emerging as the leaders of Right and Left.

Mauro Biuzzi, Pozzi’s executor, said that he had been present when her ashes were interred at Lerma. Simone Pozzi, the actress’s brother, said that the spot had not been marked lest it became a shrine for “the prurient”. He would show the prosecutor the place if asked, “but we want her left in peace”.

But Father Piero Martini, the priest at Lerma, said: “I have looked for the record of her death in our parish archives, but it’s not there. I don’t believe that she is buried here.”

DISAPPEARING ACTS

Lord Lucan, suspected of murdering his children's nanny, disappeared in 1974

Times Recommends

• Fish and chip shops ‘selling cobbler as cod’
• T in the Park festival at Kinross
• How to get Madonna’s Thighs