Gangster body is exhumed in mystery of missing Vatican girl

Ms Orlandi was 15 when she disappeared in 1983 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.

Mr De Pedis, a member of Rome’s Magliana crime gang, was killed in 1990. A former girlfriend has reportedly told prosecutors that De Pedis kidnapped Ms Orlandi, and an anonymous caller in 2005 told a call-in television show that the answer to Ms Orlandi’s disappearance lay in his tomb

Amid a new push to resolve the case, the Vatican said last month it had no objections to opening the tomb.

The scene yesterday outside the Sant’Apollinare basilica was hectic, with television cameras jostling for views inside the chapel and the adjacent courtyard of the Opus Dei-run Pontifical Holy Cross University, where forensic vans came and went.

An overwhelming stench filled the air as medical personnel in white suits and masks mingled with priests in black clerical garb and ducked into a blue tent where samples of Mr De Pedis’ remains were believed to have been brought.

Lorenzo Radogna, a Mr De Pedis family lawyer, told reporters outside that investigators had found some 200 “containers” with bones near De Pedis’ tomb, and that they would be tested in the coming days and weeks.

Ms Orlandi’s brother, Pietro, who was at the scene, said samples from the body had been taken for further tests and the tomb re-closed. He said the corpse was in relatively good condition, but there was only one body – that of a male – inside.

There had initially been speculation that Emanuela Orlandi’s kidnapping was linked in some way to an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, which had occurred two years earlier, and the jailing of the gunman, Ali Agca.

Doubts have also been cast on whether the Vatican itself had co-operated fully with the investigation.

In 2008, Italian news reports quoted Mr De Pedis’ former girlfriend as telling prosecutors that Ms Orlandi had been kidnapped by the Magliana gang on the orders of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the late prelate who had headed the Vatican bank and was linked to a huge Italian banking scandal in the 1980s. Marcinkus had always asserted his innocence in the scandal and the Vatican at the time of the allegation said the woman’s claims had “extremely doubtful value.”

In a lengthy statement last month, Vatican spokesman the Reverend Federico Lombardi insisted the Holy See had done everything possible to try to resolve the case.

Pietro Ms Orlandi said the move to exhume the tomb was a step forward in the investigation, and he hoped it showed a new willingness on the part of the Vatican to co-operate fully and show full transparency about what it knows.

“I think it’s something very positive, both from the point of view of the Vatican and the prosecutors,” he told a media conference.