A German man with Irish citizenship who lives in the Republic is set to appeal his conviction for murdering his wife on a cruise ship in Italy in 2017, and says no efforts have yet been made to extradite him to start serving the prison sentence imposed on him.
Daniel Belling (51), who has lived in Dublin with his children for many years, was last week sentenced by an Italian court to 26 years after being convicted of murdering Xiang Lei Li (38) and disposing of her body at sea. However, the whereabouts of her remains and the mechanism of her death have never been established.
Ms Xiang went missing while on a 10-day Mediterranean cruise in 2017, and Belling denied that he killed her. Through his Italian lawyer, he has told The Irish Times he would appeal his conviction.
Luigi Conti confirmed that an appeal, which may take many years, would now be taken to the Court of Cassation, which is effectively a higher-level appeal court in the Italian legal system.
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“For now there is no extradition request,” Mr Conti added when asked whether the Italian authorities had moved to seek co-operation from Ireland to extradite his client to commence his prison sentence.
Belling, with addresses at Kilkee House, Clarke Village, Coolock, Dublin 17, and more recently in Cork, is the father of two young children which he had during his marriage to his Chinese wife, who is missing and assumed to have been murdered by the Italian authorities.
While Belling was born in Germany and lived much of his life there, he settled in Ireland more than a decade ago, and both of his children were born here.
An Irish citizen, he has worked as an IT professional. He was convicted in Dublin in two years ago of dishonestly inducing the Bank of Ireland to provide a mortgage loan of €112,500 on March 13th, 2014.
On five other occasions, Belling used false documents on dates between July 1st, 2013, and January 27th, 2015, to attempt to apply for loans, Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard. Passing sentence of 3½ years which was suspended fully in July 2022, Judge Martin Nolan said this offence was a “classic white-collar crime”.
Belling’s wife went missing during a 10-day Mediterranean cruise which started and ended in the port of Civitavecchia, north of Rome. The couple and their children – then aged 6 and 4 years – apparently disembarked from the MSC Magnifica in February 2017, after it anchored in Civitavecchia.
However, the ship’s crew noticed a discrepancy in the number of passengers alighting compared with the number registered as having been aboard. On further examination, the crew confirmed Ms Belling had boarded on February 10th but had not disembarked 10 days later. None of the crew could confirm they had seen her in the days before her absence was noticed.
Police detained Belling at Rome’s Ciampino airport, where he was about to board a flight to Dublin with the two children. He was taken to Rome’s Regina Coeli prison and charged. He spent 14 months on remand in Italy before being released and returning to Ireland.
Last week, more than seven years after his arrest, he was convicted in Italy, in his absence, of murdering his wife, and a 26-year sentence imposed. The prosecution claimed he had killed his wife and then disposed of her remains by fixing her body to a trolley and throwing it into the sea.
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