Missing Vatican girl sighted after two decades

Italian police have reopened an inquiry into a kidnapping which took place 21 years ago, after claims that a teenage girl taken hostage by anti-papal conspirators is secretly living under an assumed name close to the Vatican. Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, was kidnapped in 1983, two years after the attempted assassination of the Pope. Investigators in Italy and the Vatican believe the kidnappers were Turkish extremists linked with the KGB, who hoped to exchange her for Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who fired at the Pope on St Peter’s Square on 13 May 1981. This week however Ms Roberta Hidalgo, a freelance photographer, said she had been developing photographs of people in St Peter’s Square when by chance she spotted “a familiar female face”. “The face jumped out at me,” she told Il Giornale. “I thought it was someone I knew or an actress. I had an extraordinary sense of deja vu.” It then came to her that the woman looked “exactly as Emanuela Orlandi would have looked 20 years on”.

The report didn't offer ANY photos, but I googled her name and found the article below:

Emanuela Orlandi disappeared on June 22, 1983 after 19:00 hours p.m. The daughter of Ercole Orlandi, a Vatican employee, at the time of her disappearance Emanuela was 15 years old, went to a scientific high school and, in the afternoons, the Ludovico Da Victoria music school in Piazza Sant'Apollinare.
The afternoon of June 22, Emanuela arrived at her flute lesson late. Later, at 7 p.m., she explained her lateness in a phone call to her sister, during which she said she had had a job offer from a representative of the Avon cosmetics company to promote the cosmetics on the occasion of a fashion show. Her sister suggested that she talk it over with her parents before making any decisions.
Emanuela allegedly met with the would-be representative shortly before her music lesson. At the end of the lesson, Emanuela spoke of the matter also with her girlfriend Raffaella Monzi, who then left Emanuela at the bus stop, in the company of an unknown girl who has never been identified. Someone supposedly saw her get into a large, dark-colored car. From that moment Emanuela vanished. Her family immediately published notices in the newspapers. The city was covered with posters carrying Emanuela's pictures. Thus began a mystery that would also involve the Vatican, and which has remained unsolved to this day.

On May 14, 2001, Father Giovanni Ranieri Lucci, the parish priest of the church of San Gregorio VII in Rome, found a human skull closed inside two plastic bags in a confessional; between the first and the second bag there was a holy picture of Padre Pio. The priest, believing it was a macabre joke, went to the Carabinieri.
It was a small skull, without the jawbone, and missing the upper teeth. It had probably been left in the church the day before, May 13th. Precisely on that day, a short distance away, in St. Peter's Square, the Pope was speaking to the crowd of the attack he had suffered exactly twenty years earlier. Was it a simple coincidence or a sign? Probably a message sent to someone who would know how to interpret the language of the symbols in the matter of which the Pope has been protagonist for twenty years. The first symbol is in the date: May 13, 1917 is the date of the apparition at Fatima. One of the secrets of Fatima includes a vision of a bishop dressed in white, fatally attacked in a large square. Whoever ordered the attack against Karol Wojtyla - a Pope who is particularly devoted to the Virgin - on May 13, 1981 must have known these symbols very well.
The kidnapping of Emanuela Orlandi, the only minor-age citizen of the Vatican, was probably the most powerful weapon of blackmail that unknown perpetrators could have used against the Pope. Emanuela's case soon became one of international intrigue: messages, claims, and hints left especially in various Roman churches, connected the matter to the Pope and his attacker. And now there are some who believe that the skull found in the church of San Gregorio could belong to the girl who disappeared eighteen years ago and whose home, moreover, is just a short distance away from the church.

Studies carried out on the Orlandi affair by Professor Francesco Bruno, a criminologist, lead to alarming conclusions: "I think the girl died back then," he explains. "Those who arrived at the point of kidnapping her certainly had no scruples about killing her. They couldn't risk having such an important and dangerous witness around. They didn't kidnap her for money, but to achieve a very powerful moral blackmail. Almost all those who acted in this expedition are dead; they, too, have been killed. No live witnesses could remain."

From the first study done on the skull, considering the small size, it was supposed that it might be of a girl, who died fifteen or twenty years ago. "It is a date that is compatible with Emanuela's possible death," explains Bruno. "The skull probably remained buried in the ground all these years. The teeth might have been pulled out when the girl was still alive, or later, with the intention of preventing recognition. The skull may have received blows, which perhaps were inflicted to stun the victim. It is surely a corpus delicti: that person did not die a natural death."
An initial attempt to compare the photo of the skull with that of Emanuela Orlandi's face seems to reveal an extraordinary correspondence of characteristics. A DNA test has been ordered, and the girl's parents, even though they are convinced the skull is not their daughter's, have offered their cooperation for the comparison.

"The skull was chosen carefully," adds the professor, "either because it is Emanuela's, or because it has to resemble hers. Behind an apparently simple operation is a complex organization, of secret services capable of actions such as this, acting in manners that leave eternal doubts."

It is, in any case, an ambiguous matter: was it a joke, as Father Giovanni thinks, or something serious?

VATICAN CITY - The release of the Turk who shot Pope John Paul II may shed light on a quarter-century-old mystery: the disappearance of the teenage daughter of a Vatican employee whose kidnappers say was abducted to win the gunman's freedom.

Emanuela Orlandi's family has asked prosecutors to reopen the case because "new elements" have emerged that warrant investigation, the family's lawyer, Massimo Krogh, told The Associated Press on Monday.

He declined to speculate on whether the release of Mehmet Ali Agca, 47, from a Turkish prison would affect the case. But he cautioned that Agca has been a highly inconsistent witness over the years.

"He has said so many things. One cannot trust him," Krogh said.

Another investigator, however, said Agca's release can only help the investigation into Orlandi's disappearance, although prosecutors haven't decided whether to reopen the case.

Agca is to be freed on parole Thursday because he has completed his prison term for crimes committed in Turkey, a Turkish military court ruled last week. However, an official said Monday he may still face trial in Turkey for allegedly dodging the draft and escaping military custody.

Agca was extradited to Turkey in 2000 after serving almost 20 years in prison in Italy for shooting and wounding the pope on May 13, 1981, in St. Peter's Square.

Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican messenger, disappeared after a music lesson in Rome on June 22, 1983. She was 15 at the time. Her self-proclaimed kidnappers demanded Agca's release for her freedom, although they never offered any proof they had the girl or that she was alive.

Krogh said the Orlandi family believes there was a connection between Emanuela's disappearance and the attempt on John Paul's life and that the kidnappers wanted to exchange her for Agca. But asked whether Agca's release might also mean freedom for Orlandi, Krogh responded: "I frankly cannot say."

However, Judge Ferdinando Imposimato, who once headed the investigation into the attempt on John Paul's life, said Agca's freedom could only help the investigation.

Imposimato has maintained Agca was directed by Bulgarian agents and that he had been approached by a Soviet general in the KGB before the shooting. A Bulgarian-Soviet connection has long been suspected because of Soviet alarm over the pope's support for the Solidarity trade union in Poland.

But Italian investigators never found any hard evidence and John Paul himself ruled out any Bulgarian role during a 2002 trip to that country, declaring he had "never believed in the so-called Bulgarian connection because of my great esteem and respect for the people."

Imposimato told the Apcom news agency that Agca's freedom, and any possible new testimony, "could help resolve the mystery of the disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi."

He acknowledged in an interview with the ANSA news agency, however, that it was unlikely Italian investigators would ever get a chance to question Agca, "even if Agca promised to cooperate after his release."

Agca spoke about Orlandi during a 1985 prison interview with Italy's RAI state television, saying the girl was alive and not in danger. He denied any direct knowledge of her fate, though, saying he had made "some logical deductions."

He said then that he wished she would be freed "without any precondition."

The Vatican, meanwhile, has limited its reaction to Agca's pending release to stressing that it defers to the Turkish judicial system.

Papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls recalled on Vatican Radio on Monday that John Paul had personally pardoned Agca while still hospitalized after the attempt on his life, saying "I pardon the brother who struck me." John Paul also forgave Agca during a 1983 prison visit.

But Navarro-Valls stressed the Vatican never interfered in either the Italian or Turkish court processes or Italy's decision to pardon him and extradite him to Turkey.

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