The Vatican will resume its investigation into the disappearance of its underage citizen Emanuela Orlandiova after 40 years. This was reported on Monday by the AP agency, citing a statement by Vatican prosecutor Alessandro Diddi. According to the Vatican, this is due to the initiative of Orlandia’s brother Pietro. Streaming service Netflix recently published a documentary series about a missing girl.
Fifteen-year-old Orlandi disappeared under circumstances still unclear in mid-June 1983. She was the daughter of a Vatican official, lived in an ecclesiastical state, and also held Vatican citizenship, which increased media interest in the case. The girl apparently disappeared in Italy. Some witnesses claim that she was last seen in the center of Rome. In the past, Italian and intertiol media have linked her case to intertiol tensions around the Vatican or to Roman organized crime. However, neither the Italian nor the Vatican investigators were able to prove any of these theories.
Vatican Prosecutor Diddy announced today that his office and the Vatican Gendarmerie will reinvestigate the case. According to Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni, this is also happening based on a number of assumptions made by the relatives of the missing girl. According to the Rai News server, Vatican officials will examine in detail information from previous investigations, as well as focus on little-studied investigative hypotheses. They will also deal with new information.
“I want to be very careful, but the fact that the Vatican authorities have launched an investigation is good news for me,” said the brother of the missing girl, Pietro Orlandi. The family’s lawyer, Laura Sgro, said the relatives were not informed about the Vatican procedure and learned about it from the press. Orlandi’s relatives have criticized the Vatican in the past for not releasing all the information about the girl’s disappearance or cooperating enough to clarify the matter.
Interest in the case has been revived in recent weeks thanks to the four-part Netflix docu-series The Vatican Girl, which aired late last year. After the series aired, some Italian legislators called for the creation of a parliamentary commission of inquiry.
Source: Blesk