The Vatican wants to help solve mysteries surrounding Emanuela Orlandi

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It’s a cold case that drove the detectives to despair. In 1983, the daughter of a Vatican employee disappeared without a trace in Rome. But there is new hope. Almost 40 years after the mysterious disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the public prosecutor in Rome has launched a new investigation. According to media reports on Monday, she will work with Vatican prosecutor Alessandro Diddi, who announced new investigations in January at the urging of Emanuela Orlandi’s family. The case is considered one of the greatest mysteries in recent Italian criminal history.

Emanuela, then 15, had not returned home from music lessons in Rome on June 22, 1983. Her body was never found. There were always new rumors about her disappearance, in which the Vatican also played a role.

According to popular theory, the girl was kidnapped by a mafia gang to put pressure on the Vatican to pay back a loan. Accordingly, the head of the Roman Magliana clan, Enrico De Pedis, is said to have been involved in the case. According to another unproven theory, Emanuela was kidnapped to free Mehmet Ali Agca, who had assassinated Pope John Paul II in 1981.

The Pope’s confidant allegedly abused her

Last year, the Netflix documentary series “Vatican Girl” covered the mystery case. In it, a friend reported that Emanuela had confided in her a week before her disappearance that she had been abused in the Vatican Gardens by a confidant of the then Pope John Paul II.

The prosecutor’s office in Rome had already investigated the case in the years 1983 to 1997 and 2008 to 2015, but without reaching a conclusion. The Vatican has been accused of obstructing the investigation for decades.

But now his chief prosecutor Diddi and the Roman prosecutors led by Francesco Lo Voi “worked together on the case”, reported the daily “Repubblica”. According to the Corriere della Sera, the Vatican had also questioned clerics in recent weeks as part of its investigation. The hope now is that he will cooperate fully with the Roman investigators.

Vatican prosecutors are cooperating

According to their lawyer Laura Sgro, the Orlandi family first learned about the new investigation through the newspapers. Sgro spoke of “good news”. It is the “first time that Italian and Vatican prosecutors have worked together to find out the truth”.

According to the Corriere della Sera, the new investigations are mainly based on statements by former prosecutor Giancarlo Capaldo, according to which two Vatican representatives had promised to reveal the whereabouts of Orlandi’s body. In 2019, the Vatican opened two bone cellars to search for the remains of the missing. According to the researchers, only old bones were found in it. (AFP)

Source: Blick