The mystery of Emanuela Orlandi: in his search, they discovered dozens of bones on people in a Vatican school.

A geneticist hired by the family of a missing Italian young woman in 1983 said Saturday that the cavernous underground space located near a Vatican cemetery contained thousands of bones that appeared to be dozens of individuals, "adults and non-adults". .

The expert, Giorgio Portera, said that the "huge" number of bones under the Teutonic Pontifical College had been revealed when Vatican-appointed experts had begun to catalog the remains discovered last week.

"We were not expecting this huge amount" of bones and other remains that "were thrown into the cavity," Portera said. "We want to know why and how" the bones stopped there.

Fragments were also found, which complicated the work of the experts, he added.

Portera works for the family of Emanuela Orlandi, who disappeared at the age of 15 when she was traveling from her family's apartment to the Vatican to a music clbad in Rome.

Some have speculated that she was kidnapped as part of a failed blackmail attempt to free the Italian gunman who had shot John Paul II in St. Peter's Square in 1981 in an Italian jail. .

A Vatican Saturday statement did not mention the amount of remains in space recently discovered near the Teutonic cemetery, but said that police forensic work would continue on July 27.

The Orlandi family had already received the anonymous advice of searching near the tomb of the nineteenth century the tombs of two princesses in the small pantheon.

But when the Vatican just opened the tombs at the request of the family, they were empty. The Vatican said it did not know why, but that may be due to restoration work undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s.

* AP