Vatican official accused of ordering teen girl's murder
A FORMER senior Vatican official was accused yesterday of ordering the murder of a teenage girl who disappeared 25 years ago.
Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, was 15 when she vanished after a flute lesson in central Rome. She was last seen at a bus stop on her way home on June 22, 1983.
The investigation into her disappearance was reopened this week following new evidence from the former girlfriend of Enrico De Pedis, a Roman mobster.
Sabrina Minardi, a recovering drug addict, told Italian police that De Pedis had kidnapped Emanuela, put her in a sack and thrown her into a cement mixer in Torvaianica, on the coast near Rome.
Ms Minardi said the girl had been seized and killed on the orders of Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the then head of the Vatican Bank. Marcinkus died in 2006 in Sun City, Arizona, after being disgraced.
Investigated
The archbishop was investigated by the Organised Crime office of the US Justice Department after they found a request for $950m (€612m) of counterfeit bonds made on Vatican notepaper.
In 1982, Marcinkus was implicated in the collapse of Banco Ambrosiano and the death of Roberto Calvi, the head of the bank, whose body was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge.
The archbishop was alleged to have had ties with Michele Sindona, a mafioso, and was forced to stand aside as head of the Vatican Bank in 1989.
Emanuela was killed "to send a message to someone", said Ms Minardi, without revealing more.
She also said she sometimes took girls to meet Marcinkus. She said that she took bags of money as well for the cash to be laundered.
Police said that there were "some issues of incongruence, especially involving time periods,'' with Ms Minardi's statement but that there "are also some details that are so precise and detailed that they definitely deserve further investigation''. (© Daily Telegraph,London)
- Malcolm Moore in Rome
