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Vatican City (AFP) – The family of a teenager who disappeared in Italy in 1983 asked the Vatican on Wednesday to provide more details about the discovery of human remains in one of his properties.
The bones were discovered Monday by builders renovating a Vatican-owned building in Rome, the Holy See announced, as part of a potential breakthrough for police investigating one of the darkest mysteries of Italy.
Since the terrible find, the Italian media have speculated that they could shed light on the fate of one or perhaps two teenagers disappeared in the 1980s.
"We will ask the prosecutors and the Holy See of Rome how the bones were found and why their discovery was linked to the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi or Mirella Gregori," the lawyer told the media. Orlandi's family, Laura Sgro.
The statement issued Tuesday by the Holy See "provides virtually no information," she said.
Sgro was speaking on behalf of the family, which, she said, would not comment until the DNA tests were done.
The remains were found in a building located on the green field of the Holy See Embassy in Italy.
The property had been left to the Vatican in 1949 by a Jewish businessman belonging to the fascist party before the introduction of racial laws in Italy, and then converted to Catholicism, according to Italian media reports.
The builders found an almost complete skeleton in one place and bone fragments to another, the daily Repubblica reported.
The statement made Tuesday by the Vatican did not refer to either Orlandi or Gregori.
The two girls were minors when they disappeared separately in Rome in 1983.
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Orlandi was the daughter of a member of the Vatican Police and was last seen on June 22, 1983, while she was leaving a music class.
Theories have circulated that this 15-year-old man was abducted by an organized crime gang to pressure Vatican officials to recover a loan.
According to another claim, it was allegedly taken to force the release of Turkish prisoner Mehmet Ali Agca, who had attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981.
Orlandi's brother, Pietro, has for decades been campaigning to find out what happened to him and accused the Vatican of silence and even complicity in the affair.
In 2017, the conspiracy specialists were driven to frenzy by a document leaked – but apparently falsified – allegedly written by a cardinal and indicating concealment by the Vatican.
He was referring to an expenditure report on what the Vatican had spent to remove Orlandi and send him to live abroad in secret.
The Vatican has repeatedly stated to have cooperated with the Italian police in this case.
Gregori, then 16, disappeared exactly 40 days before Orlandi.
Her mother said she answered the intercom in the family apartment before telling her parents that she was a school friend and that she was going out to talk to her. She never came back.
"In my heart, I hope the bones are those of Mirella, so we can end this affair and that I can have a place to go to cry and take my sister's flowers," said to La Repubblica Maria Antonietta Gregori.
Investigators have not ruled out that cases may be related.
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This is not the first time that the Italian police is following a possible trail to find the body of Orlandi.
In 2012, forensic experts exhuming the grave of a famous crime official in a Vatican church discovered about 400 bone boxes.
Enrico De Pedis, leader of the Magliana gang, was suspected of having participated in his kidnapping and some assumed that the young man could be buried at his side – although the DNA tests could not find a match.
The observations of the teenager over the years have proved to be unfounded. She would now be 50 years old.
The first investigation into the disappearance of Orlandi was closed in 1997.
In 2007, the lover of De Pedis told investigators that he had kidnapped and killed the girl on the order of the head of the Vatican Bank.
The statement – that she would have seen the girl's body buried in a cement-covered bag – sparked a new investigation that resulted in nothing.
Police closed the investigation in 2016, after which Pietro Orlando asked the Vatican to open his own investigation.
"Truth and justice are sacrosanct, we will never give up," he told the media on the last anniversary of his passing.
