Vatican defends late banker from murder accusation

By Phil Stewart

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican defended the late archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the head of the Vatican Bank whose tenure was marred by financial scandal, from media reports on Tuesday that he ordered the killing of a 15-year-old girl in 1983.

Marcinkus, an American who died in Arizona in 2006 at the age of 84, was accused by the girlfriend of a slain mobster of hiring hitmen to kidnap and kill Emanuela Orlandi in 1983, the Italian media and some foreign newspapers said.

"Defamatory, baseless accusations were published regarding Mons. Marcinkus, who has been dead for some time and is unable to defend himself," responded the Vatican in a statement chiding the media for publishing the accusations "without any checks".

The unsolved disappearance of Orlandi, daughter of a Vatican employee, is regularly the subject of wild conjecture here and reproductions of the original black-and-white "Missing" poster are now displayed all over Rome to mark the 25th anniversary.

It is not the first time Orlandi's disappearance has been linked to the Vatican. Investigators even probed at one point if there was a link to the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul in 1981 by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca.

Anonymous callers said after she went missing in 1983 that she would be freed if Italy released Agca. But police were never able to confirm any connection between the two cases.

There has also long been speculation of a link between the Orlandi case and alleged mafia involvement in Vatican finances.

Such theories connect Orlandi's disappearance and the still unsolved death in 1982 of Italian Roberto Calvi, known as "God's Banker", who was found hanged from Blackfriars Bridge in London after the institution he ran, Banco Ambrosiano, collapsed.