She hadn't forgiven her violent and abusive husband, but she felt she had no choice but to stay in the house she was paying for with him through a mortgage. The house where, on December 3rd, her husband beat her to death, including with a metal pipe.

It's the portrait of a desperate woman, not at all subjugated by her husband but with a life with no way out, barricaded in her bedroom at night. Sadjide 'Sagi' Muslija, the 49-year-old Macedonian seamstress, was killed in Pianello Vallesina di Monte Roberto (Ancona) by her husband, Nazif Muslija, 50, who had already been harassing her for years and had even been arrested for abuse. Remembering that woman, once cheerful and smiling, then segregated by her abusive husband, is Antonella Giampieri, owner of "Confezioni Privilegio," the small workshop in Jesi (Ancona) where 'Sagi' had worked for 18 years. She had recently begun confiding in her colleagues. She had become "a friend, a member of the family" to them.

The businesswoman herself had raised the alarm on the morning of the crime because Sadjide' had not shown up for work.

After 40 hours on the run between the provinces of Ancona and Macerata, Nazif Musljia was found Thursday in a remote area of the Macerata province, in Sant'Anna-Braccano. A hunter found him hanging from a tree by a rope and rescued him by cutting the rope when he was unconscious. The Matelica Carabinieri and the emergency medical service immediately intervened to transport him to the hospital. He was then swiftly discharged, his life not deemed to be in danger, and transferred to Montacuto prison in Ancona. A suicide attempt that raises questions that only the man himself can clarify.

The hearing to validate the arrest for aggravated voluntary manslaughter will be held tomorrow. Musljia will remain in custody, via video link with Macerata investigating judge Daniela Bellesi, who is responsible for the man's arrest in the Macerata area. Subsequently, the investigation, coordinated by prosecutor Rosario Lioniello with Carabinieri investigations, will be returned to the Ancona prosecutor's office.

"Sagi had been afraid of her husband for two years," the 49-year-old's employer told ANSA. "They lived separately in the house, she upstairs, he in the basement. He wanted a divorce, that's what he told us. At night, he locked himself in his room and took tranquilizers to sleep."

She was terrified, she told her colleagues, she had hoped her husband would leave and tried to enter a shelter for abused women herself, "in vain": "She was paying the mortgage on the house and couldn't afford rent, she didn't want to give up her job and the sacrifices of a lifetime or start over in Switzerland, where her son lived."

Sagi: "She wasn't calm, but she had no choice. Lately, she seemed a little calmer, so she said, yet every now and then we'd hear her crying in the bathroom, and she'd snap when one of us put a hand on her shoulder from behind."

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