FOR nearly 30 years it has been one of Italy’s most tantalising mysteries: what happened to Emanuela Orlandi?
Why was her alleged kidnapper buried with honours among cardinals and saints?
Magistrates investigating the disappearance of the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee in 1983 may now find out after the Vatican agreed to allow them to open the tomb of Enrico De Pedis, the boss of Banda della Magliana, Rome’s most notorious criminal gang.
It has never been clear why the Vatican allowed a known murderer and alleged kidnapper to be buried in the crypt of the Basilica of Saint Apollinaris after he was shot dead in a Rome street in 1990.
The plot thickened five years ago when a caller to an Italian TV show said: “If you want to solve the Orlandi kidnapping go and see who is buried in the crypt of the Basilica of Saint Apollinaris.”
Police identified the caller as Carlo Alberto De Tomasi, whose father, Giuseppe, was a leading member of the Magliana gang. The phone call gave rise to the theory that Orlandi was buried in the tomb under De Pedis’s plaque.
Members of the Magliana gang have told police De Pedis kidnapped Orlandi. It has been speculated that she was seized on the orders of the KGB to put pressure on Italy to release Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981. The Kremlin, so the theory goes, feared Agca would reveal who was behind the plot and used Orlandi as a bargaining chip.
Two years ago another theory emerged. Sabrina Minardi, former mistress of De Pedis, claimed the gangster kidnapped Orlandi on the orders of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, head of the Vatican bank at the time. She said De Pedis killed Orlandi after she became a liability and that he put her in a sack and threw her into a cement mixer.
Marcinkus, who died in 2006, was also implicated in the 1982 collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the mysterious death of Roberto Calvi, its director.
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