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It’s a tale of murder, secret codes and conspiracy - and even Opus Dei - that could have come straight from the pages of a Dan Brown novel.

The fate of Emanuela Orlandi, a 15-year-old girl who disappeared without a trace from the Vatican on the way to a flute lesson in 1983, has gripped Italians for the last three decades.

But now the mystery could finally unravel - with a coded message which appears to indicate where the teenager’s body was secretly buried.

“Look where the angel points,” reads the message in an anonymous letter sent to her family.

The angel is a centuries-old stone statue on top of an unmarked tomb within the the Teutonic Cemetery, which lies within the Vatican walls.

(Image: PA Images)

And unlike other many similar statues in the tiny city state, the angel’s hand is pointing downwards - towards whatever is buried underneath.

The cemetery is not accessible to the general public and no-one knows who was once buried there.

Yet the tomb is mysteriously tended every day, with a lit red votive candle that is never allowed to go out, and always fresh flowers in a vase.

The only thing engraved on it is a marble scroll the angel holds, which reads Requiescat in Pace - or Rest in Peace.

The Orlandi family now wants the Pope to grant permission to exhume whoever or whatever lies inside the tomb, which is reported to have been opened “at least once” - and resealed - within the last few decades.

(Image: AFP/Getty Images)

A Vatican spokesman this week said in a statement that the Holy See is “studying” the matter and will soon decide whether to honour the request.

If Emanuela is found to have been murdered and buried inside the Vatican it could engulf the Catholic church in its biggest scandal to date.

And it will give oxygen to one of the most sensational theories about her disappearance - that the schoolgirl was kidnapped by high-ranking clerics who kept her as a sex slave before killing her.

Pierto Orlandi, Emanuela’s brother, said he believes the Vatican’s highest powers know much more about his sister’s disappearance than they have so far let on.

“I wish so much that this story was a hoax. I really wish Emanuela was not here,” he told a local newspaper.

While this is the most precise indication yet of where she might be buried, the claim that she was snatched by a Vatican paedophile ring has been made before - by people close to the Church's very centre of power.

(Image: AFP/Getty Images)

The Vatican's chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth, a great confidant of retired Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, said in 2012 that Emanuela was snatched from the streets of central Rome in the summer of 1983 and forced to take part in sex parties.

Fr Amorth, who died in 2016, said: "This was a crime with a sexual motive. Parties were organised, with a Vatican gendarme acting as the 'recruiter' of the girls.

"The network involved diplomatic personnel from a foreign embassy to the Holy See. I believe Emanuela ended up a victim of this circle.”

In 2016, Monsignor Simeone Duca, an archivist with the Vatican, backed up the exorcist’s claims.

He cited "credible information" that “certain factions” inside the Vatican’s diplomatic corps were involved in procuring young adolescent girls for sexual slavery.

He, too, said he believed that the teenager was abducted for that purpose and later murdered.

It is not the only theory that has emerged about what happened to Emanuela in what is still one of Italy’s most enduring mysteries.

(Image: Getty Images)

They include the early claim that Turkish militants tied to the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II had taken the schoolgirl to secure the release of Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to shoot the pope in 1981.

Then, in 2008, the mistress of a gangster named Enrico De Pedis told authorities that he organised Emanuela's kidnapping at the behest of the controversial American archbishop, Paul C. Marcinkus, the former president of the Vatican Bank, who died in 2006.

Some have suggested that Emanuela's father Ercole, a Vatican clerk, had evidence of wrongdoing committed by Marcinkus, and that he asked De Pedis to kidnap the girl to keep the clerk quiet.

A traffic warden who had seen Emanuela speaking to a man in a green BMW the night she disappeared worked to produce a sketch of the man, who looked very similar to De Pedis.

And in 2017, Italian journalist Emiliano Fittipaldi published a document that had been stolen from the Vatican.

It appears to show that the church knew where the teen was and had been paying her expenses for years, including room and board and gynaecological examinations.

(Image: Mondadori Portfolio Editorial)

The Vatican called the document "false and ridiculous."

What is without doubt, though, are the very strange circumstances which surrounded her sudden vanishing on June 22, 1983.

The teenager, who had just finished her second year of high school, left the left the family's apartment in Vatican City and travelled to a flute lesson in Rome.

On the way to the flute lesson, the man in the green BMW stopped her on the street and offered her money to sell Avon cosmetics, which she refused. Troubled, she called her sister to tell her about the incident.

Once she arrived at the lesson, she was distracted and asked to leave early, around 6.50pm.

Emanuela was last seen in front of Sant'Apollinare, a church in Rome belonging to the ultra-secretive Catholic organisation Opus Dei that played a mayor role in The Da Vinci Code novel.

In the days after her disappearance the Orlandi family started receiving anonymous calls with tips about their daughter's whereabouts, none of them leading anywhere.

(Image: AFP)

Pope John Paul II waded into the case on July 3, 1983, when he made a public appeal for her safe return after a public prayer, saying "I am close to the Orlandi family."

Two days after the pope’s address, someone called both the Orlandi family and the Vatican, saying that a group had taken the teen to secure the release of Mehmet Ali Agca.

The caller, who was American, backed up his claims by leading agents to a photocopy of Emanuela's registration card for her music school, and sending a letter containing photo copies of the sheet music she was studying at the time.

But he stopped communicating after October 27 and was never heard from again.

A number of attempts have also been made recently to locate Emanuela’s remains, with the first linked to the secretive Opus Dei church.

The only person ever investigated over the disappearance was Monsignor Piero Vergari, the former rector of the Sant’Apollinare church where she went missing.

He was a friend of gangster Enrico De Pedis, and after he died he petitioned to let his body be buried at the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare, a place usually reserved for senior clerics, not criminals.

(Image: MAX ROSSI)

In 2012, De Pedis's grave was exhumed to see whether Emanuela's remains might be hidden inside with his, but although, bizarrely, there were lots of human bones around his tomb, nothing matched the missing teen.

And last November, workers renovating an annex of the Vatican's embassy to Italy in Rome discovered bones underneath the flooring, sparking immediate questions they may be connected to the teenager’s disappearance.

Sometime after Emanuela’s disappearance, Monsignor Vergari is reported to have worked at the embassy.

But the bones turned out to be around 200 years old.

This week’s new lead could yet be another blind alley, or could maybe finally solve the mystery that has obsessed Italy, and haunted the Orlandi family, for over three decades.

Emanuela’s brother Pierto knows there is still a long way to go to find the truth, especially as it could take weeks, months or even years, for the Vatican to respond to his family’s request to open the tomb.

And with each day that goes by, he is more convinced that the Church knows much more about what happened to his lost sister than they had ever been willing to admit.

He said: “We've been asking for collaboration from the Vatican for 35 years.

“Collaboration that has never been. This time we are asking again. Even collaboration that is discreet, just to understand. Just to remove this doubt.”