Vatican, 10 January, 2023 / 1:30 pm (ACI Africa).
The Vatican promoter of justice announced Monday that the investigation into the vanishing of Emanuela Orlandi, a teenaged Vatican citizen whose disappearance in the 1980s has since spawned myriad conspiracy theories, will be reopened.
In a brief statement posted to Vatican News, the Holy See Press Office director, Matteo Bruni, reported Monday that the decision to reopen the investigation was made partly in response to several requests made by Orlandi’s family.
Bruni said the promoter of justice — essentially the prosecutor — for the Vatican, Alessandro Diddi, had confirmed this decision to once more open the case, which has been closed for nearly three years.
Emanuela Orlandi was the 15-year-old daughter of Ercole Orlandi, an envoy of the Prefecture of the Pontifical House and a citizen of Vatican City State. Her disappearance on June 22, 1983, after leaving for a music lesson in Rome dominated headlines and has been the subject of speculation for years.
In April 2020, a Vatican judge officially closed the case, which had been reopened the previous year after members of Orlandi’s family received a tip that the girl’s remains could be in a Vatican cemetery. That investigation ultimately authorized the opening of two tombs in the cemetery of the Teutonic College, which sits on Vatican-owned property adjacent to the city-state; those graves were found to be completely empty, and in an unexpected twist, Vatican officials discovered “thousands” of human bones — not Orlandi’s — in a previously unknown ossuary nearby.
