Image: ANDREAS SOLARO (AFP)
40 years after the mysterious disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, the family is hoping for developments. Pietro Orlandi, the brother of Emanuela, who disappeared in 1983 at the age of 15, met the Vatican’s chief investigator Alessandro Diddi on Tuesday. He has been investigating the mysterious case since January. Pietro Orlandi told journalists that he was “confident” that the meeting with Diddi, which he had been waiting for for two years, would bring concrete results. In the Orlandi case, it was the desire and iron will of the Pope and Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin “to create clarity without reservation,” Diddi said in an interview with the Milan daily Corriere della Sera on Tuesday.
“Both the Holy Father and Cardinal Parolin have given me the greatest possible freedom of action to carry out a comprehensive investigation without any interference and with the firm request not to conceal anything,” said the prosecutor. Diddi revealed that the investigations had brought “first results”.
Many theories
On June 22, 1983, 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi had not returned from music lessons. The case is considered one of the greatest mysteries in recent Italian criminal history. New speculations and conspiracy theories, in which the Vatican also plays a role, have grown around Orlandi’s disappearance. One popular theory is that the daughter of a Vatican employee was kidnapped by a gang intent on blackmailing then-Vatican Bank boss Paul Marcinkus. Also unproven is another theory that Emanuela was kidnapped to blackmail the release of Mehmet Ali Agca, who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981.
A Netflix series broadcast in October examined all steps of the investigation process at that time, also thanks to the sometimes explosive testimonies of witnesses. They include a friend of Orlandi’s at the time, who claimed that Emanuela told her in a conversation a week before she disappeared that she had been sexually harassed by “a person very close to the Pope”.
Source: Nachrichten
