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  New Allegations Revive an Italian Mystery of the 1980s

By Elisabetta Povoledo
New York Times
June 25, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/world/europe/25italy.html?_r=1&ref=europe&oref=login

ROME — On June 22, 1983, Emanuela Orlandi, 15, was walking home in central Rome from a music lesson when she vanished.

Home was inside Vatican City, since her father was a Vatican employee. And that transformed what might have been a straightforward missing-persons case into one of Italy's most enthralling and enduring mysteries.

It was resuscitated this week after the news media here reported a witness claiming, among other things, that Emanuela had been kidnapped on the orders of an American archbishop, Paul Marcinkus, a former president of the Vatican bank. Linked to a major Italian banking scandal in the 1980s, Archbishop Marcinkus died in 2006.

On Tuesday, the Vatican defended Archbishop Marcinkus, sternly admonishing the news media for publishing confidential information leaked "from a source whose value is highly dubious," as a Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said in a statement. The source, Sabrina Minardi, was a girlfriend of Enrico De Pedis, a mobster who was killed in Rome in 1990.

But the new revelations confirmed that the Orlandi drama still has the power to rivet Italians.

Just weeks after she vanished, the Vatican received an anonymous call from her ostensible kidnappers demanding that Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, be set free in exchange for her release.

But investigations into Emanuela's disappearance have examined possible links to Bulgarian agents, the Sicilian Mafia, the K.G.B., even Roberto Calvi, known as "God's banker" because of his association with Archbishop Marcinkus and the Vatican bank. Mr. Calvi, too, met a mysterious end: He was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982.

"It's one of the great Italian mysteries that wraps into it all the mysteries of the 1980s," said Carlo Lucarelli, a novelist and the host of a television program that revives Italy's buried ghosts.

 
 

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