VATICAN CITY
Telegraph (UK)
By Nick Squires, Rome 14 Mar 2016
A mobile phone hidden inside a Catholic religious book was smuggled to a Vatican prelate who is in detention for allegedly leaking confidential Holy See documents to investigative journalists, according to local media.
Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda is one of five people accused of leaking and publishing classified Vatican documents, with their trial inside the walls of the tiny city state to resume on Monday.
Since December the Spanish prelate has been held in a building inside the Vatican under house arrest.
But at the weekend the Vatican announced that he had been effectively rearrested and returned to a cell inside the barracks of the Vatican Gendarmerie, the sovereign state’s tiny police force, because he had “violated a ban on communicating with the outside world.”
It had been one of the conditions by which he was kept under house arrest, said the Rev Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman.
A website devoted to Vatican affairs claimed that the Spanish monsignor had been caught calling friends and supporters with a mobile phone that was smuggled to him in a hollowed-out copy of The Writings of St Francis. …
Until he was returned to the Vatican gendarmerie cell, he was being held in an apartment where a disgraced Vatican ambassador, Jozef Wesolowski, was kept pending his trial.
Archbishop Wesolowski was accused of sexually abusing teenage boys in the Dominican Republic, where he was posted. But he died suddenly last August, with the Vatican saying he had suffered a cardiac arrest.
“Balda is in fear of his life,” said Gabriel Ariza, the editor of Infovaticana. “He told me in a letter. He was being kept under house arrest in the same room where Wesolowski was found dead in mysterious circumstances.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.