The family of Emanuela Orlandi, the teenage girl who went missing 35 years ago and has never been found, have asked the Vatican to open and investigate a tomb within a cemetery inside the Vatican.
The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Monday reported that the Orlandi family has received an anonymous letter claiming that the girl’s remains are in tomb within the Teutonic Cemetery, an area reserved for Germans, Austrians, Dutch and Flemish people inside the walls of the Vatican.
The letter is said to refer to a marble statue of an angel positioned above the tomb whose hand points to the ground. “Look where the angel is pointing,” the anonymous letter says.
Tests carried out on the tomb indicated that it has been opened at least once in the past, Corriere della Sera reports.
“Some people knew there was a chance Emanuela Orlandi’s body had been hidden in the German cemetery," Laura Sgrò, the family’s lawyer, wrote in a letter to the Vatican.
Sgrò said that someone had been regularly leaving flowers on the burial spot “for some years”.
The Vatican is yet to reveal if the claims made in the letter are genuine but has confirmed it is considering the family's requests.
Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti said in a statement: “I can confirm that the letter by Emanuela Orlandi's family has been received and the requests it contains will be studied.”
Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican bank functionary, who disappeared in 1983 on her way to a music lesson and whose body has never been found has remained one of modern Italy’s greatest mysteries.
Last year, hopes were raised that human remains found beneath the foundations of the Vatican’s embassy to Italy in Rome belonged to the missing girl.
The fragments of bone were later proved to be that of a man.
There are multiple theories as to what happened to the 15-year-old girl.
One theory is that an organised crime gang kidnapped the teenager, possibly to pressurise the Vatican bank into recovering a loan. Another speculates that she was taken hostage in an attempt to force the release from prison of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981.
In 2005, an anonymous caller to an Italian television show said the secret to her kidnap was buried along with Enrico “Renatino” De Pedis, a Mafia boss who led the feared Magliana gang which terrorised Rome in the 1980s.
Police eventually exhumed De Pedis’ tomb in 2012, but found no links to Orlandi’s death.