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Vatican mystery over missing girl deepens; bones found

Vatican mystery over missing girl deepens bones found
Vatican mystery over missing girl deepens; bones found

2019-07-14 00:00:00 - Source: Baghdad Post

The mystery of the 1983 disappearance of the 15-year-old

daughter of a Vatican employee took yet another twist Saturday following

excavations this week at a Vatican City cemetery: The Vatican said it had

discovered two sets of bones under a stone manhole that will be formally opened

next week.
The Vatican on Thursday had

pried open the tombs of two 19th-century German princesses in the cemetery of

the Pontifical Teutonic College in hopes of finding the remains of Emanuela

Orlandi, after her family received a tip she might be buried there.
Those hopes were dashed when

the tombs turned out to be completely empty, creating yet another mystery about

where the dead princesses were.
The Vatican noted at the time

that structural work had been carried out on both the college building and

cemetery near St. Peter’s Basilica in the 1800s and more recently, and that

further investigation would be done.
On Saturday, Vatican spokesman

Alessandro Gisotti said those investigations had centered on the areas

adjoining the tombs and had “identified two ossuaries, located under the

pavement of an area inside the Pontifical Teutonic College, covered by a

manhole.”
He said the area was

immediately sealed off and would be opened in the presence of forensic experts

July 20.
Gisotti added that the bones

were located in two holes carved out of a large stone that was covered by an

old pavement stone a few meters behind the princesses’ tomb. That area is now

technically part of the building of the Teutonic College, after expansion work

on the building encroached onto the cemetery field.
The last recorded structural

work done on the Teutonic College and cemetery was in the 1960s and 1970s.

Orlandi disappeared in 1983.
She vanished after leaving her

family’s Vatican City apartment to go to a music lesson in Rome. Her father was

a lay employee of the Holy See.
Her case has been one of the

enduring mysteries of the Vatican, kept alive by the Italian media and a quest

by her brother to find answers and closure. Over the years, her disappearance

has been linked to everything from the plot to kill St. John Paul II to the

financial scandal of the Vatican bank and Rome’s criminal underworld.
The last major twist in the

case came in 2012, when forensic police exhumed the body of a reputed mobster

from the crypt of a Roman basilica in hopes of finding Orlandi’s remains as

well. The search turned up no link.
Last year, bones were found

underneath the Vatican’s embassy to Italy in Rome. Italian media immediately

speculated the remains could belong to Orlandi or another girl who went missing

at around the same time. But forensic tests showed the bones long predated

their disappearances.
In 2017, a leading Italian

investigative journalist caused a sensation when he published a five-page

document that had been stolen from a locked Vatican cabinet that suggested the

Holy See had been involved in Orlandi’s disappearance. The Vatican immediately

branded the document a fake, though it never explained what it was doing in the

Vatican cabinet.
The document was purportedly

written by a cardinal and listed supposed expenses used for Orlandi’s upkeep

after she disappeared.
Orlandi’s brother, Pietro

Orlandi, has long demanded the Vatican give the family full access to all

information it has about Orlandi’s disappearance, keeping the cold case alive

for more than three decades.
Gisotti said this week that the

Holy See “has always shown attention and closeness to the suffering of the

Orlandi family and in particular Emanuela’s mother” and that its decision to

excavate the Teutonic cemetery at the family’s request was evidence of that

attention.





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