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	Police in Rome Re-Open Kidnap Case 25 Years on By Richard Owen The Times (United Kingdom) June 24, 2008 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4194131.ece Twenty five years after the mysterious kidnapping in Rome of a teenage girl magistrates have re-opened the inquiry into the crime, which is thought to be linked to the attempt on the life of John Paul II in 1981. Police said a woman member of the Banda della Magliana (Magliana Gang), Rome's most notorious underworld gang, had come forward to testify that she was involved in the kidnapping of Emanuela Orlandi, the 15 year old daughter of a Vatican employee, on 22 June 1983. Reports said the woman, said to be the wife of a gang leader, had driven one of the cars used in the abduction. She had given police "other details" of the crime which justified re-opening the inquiry. Ms Orlandi disappeared after taking flute lessons at a music school near Piazza Navona in the centre of Rome. She told her sister she had been offered a summer job by a cosmetics firm and was meeting its representative. She was later seen by eyewitnesses getting into "a dark BMW", and has not been seen since, even though Rome was plastered with "missing" posters and Pope John Paul appealed for her release. The Orlandi family subsequently received anonymous phone calls from the alleged kidnappers -some with rough Roman accents - offering to release their daughter in exchange for Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish extremist who shot John Paul II in St Peter's Square on May 13, 1981 and was imprisoned in a high security jail. Secret negotiations came to nothing however. Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, who led the investigation, has suggested Ms Orlandi became "integrated" into the Grey Wolves, the far-right Turkish group to which Agca belonged, and is living as a Muslim in Turkey or Paris under an assumed name. There have however been reported sightings in Rome of Ms Orlandi - who would now be forty if alive - although none has ever been confirmed. While in prison in Italy Agca, who has since been extradited to Turkey, told an interviewer he had no "direct knowledge" of Ms Orlandi's fate, but believed she was alive and "living in a cloistered convent". The suggestion that the Magliana Gang was involved in the kidnapping surfaced three years ago when an anonymous caller to "Chi L'Ha Visto?",an Italian TV programme on missing persons, suggested the clue to the mystery lay in the fact that Enrico De Pedis, the Magliana Gang boss, was buried in the crypt of the church of Saint Apollinaris, next to the music school which Ms Orlandi attended. It remains unclear why a top criminal involved in drugs and prostitution rackets was given the honour of burial in a crypt normally reserved for cardinals, saints and martyrs. Natalina Orlandi, Emanuela's sister, said "We have never lost hope that Emanuela will be found". Maria Orlandi, her mother, said she hoped Pope Benedict XVI would now issue an appeal to other witnesses to "search their consciences"and "break their silence" about Ms Orlandi's fate.
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