Skyscraper pilot said he lost money

The pilot whose light plane slammed into a Milan skyscraper last week told Italian police the day he died that he had been swindled out of a large sum of money, police said yesterday.

Senior investigator Giuseppe De Angelis said police had come to no firm conclusion as to why Luigi Fasulo, a 67-year-old Swiss-Italian, flew his propeller-driven Commander 112 aircraft into the 30-storey building last Thursday.

"Illness leading to an accident as well as suicide are the two likely theories," De Angelis, deputy chief of investigations for the Milan police, told a news conference.

Fasulo and two office workers died, and 29 people were injured, in the crash at Italy`s tallest building, which briefly raised worldwide fears of a September 11-style attack.

De Angelis said there were so far no fresh leads from an investigation into whether problems with the plane`s landing gear, which Fasulo signalled to Milan`s Linate airport shortly before the crash, helped cause the accident.

He said Fasulo, who had been flying from Locarno in southern Switzerland to Milan when he hit the skyscraper, had contacted Italian police earlier in the day to complain he had been swindled out of one million euros ($889,700) by an Italian.

But the police in Como, close to the Swiss border, told Fasulo, a retired businessman, that the case was out of their jurisdiction and he left their offices "calm but angry", De Angelis said.

Just 45 minutes before the crash, Fasulo`s son called the Como police and told them he had been threatened by unspecified individuals, he said.

On Friday, the day after the crash, the Italian Fasulo had accused of swindling him was arrested by French authories in the Riviera city of Nice on fraud and money laundering charges.

Fasulo paid one million euros in cash to the man in return for papers giving him a passbook for a 1.75 million euro bank account in Innsbruck, but when he went to Austria to claim the money, the account had just 100 euros in it, De Angelis said.