A senior Vatican official was accused yesterday of ordering the murder of a teenage girl who disappeared 25 years ago.
Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, was fifteen when she vanished after a flute lesson in Rome. She was last seen at a bus stop on her way home June 22 1983.
The investigation into her dissappearance was reopened this week after new evidence from the former girlfriend of Enrico De Pedis, a Roman mobster.
Sabrina Minardi, a recovering drug addict, told Italian police that De Pedis had kidnapped Emanuela, put her in a sack and thrown her into a cement mixer in Torvaianica, on the coast near Rome.
Minardi said the girl had been seized and killed on the orders of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the then head of the Vatican Bank.
Marcinkus died in 2006 in Sun City, Arizona. He was investigated by the United States Justice Department after they found a request for US$950 million of counterfeit bonds made on Vatican notepaper.
In 1982, Marcinkus was implicated in the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the death of Roberto Calvi, the head of the bank whose body was found hanging from Black Friars Bridge, London.
The archbishop, alledged to have had ties with mafioso Michele Sindona, was forced to stand aside as head of the Vatican Bank in 1989.
Emanuela was killed "to send a message to someone", said Minardi, without revealing more. She also said she sometimes took girls to meet Marcinkus, and bags of money as well for the cash to be laundered.
Telegraph Group LTD
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