This year's Halloween night turned spooky in reality for the Vatican's Rome embassy after some workers discovered human bones, which are possibly of a girl who went missing in 1983.
The bone fragments were found on October 26 during renovation work on an annex at the Holy See Embassy to Italy's compound, near Rome's famous Villa Borghese museum, the Vatican said in a statement on Tuesday (October 30). The Italian police are investigating the matter.
The discovery has reopened the investigation of one of Italy's biggest unsolved mysteries- the disappearance of the girl, Emanuela Orlandi, who was the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican bank employee.
Forensic scientists were trying to determine if the remains might be those of Orlandi, who vanished on her way home from a music lesson in 1983, Italian media said.
Chief prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone told the forensic specialists to determine the "age, sex and date of death" of the body.
The disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi was initially linked to a possible attempt by unknown people to win freedom for Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 and was then serving a life sentence in an Italian jail.
In 2005, an anonymous caller on a television talk show said the secret to her kidnapping was buried along with Enrico "Renatino" De Pedis, a mobster who once led the feared Magliana gang which terrorised Rome in the 1980s.
Police eventually opened his tomb in a Rome basilica in 2012 looking for clues but came up empty-handed.
The Vatican statement made no mention of Emanuela Orlandi. What happened to her is still one of the biggest and most enduring mysteries in modern Italian history.
With inputs from Reuters