Smash hit

Ms Minardi was quoted as saying that six or seven months before Ms Orlandi's death she had taken the girl on De Pedis's instructions to meet "a tall priest" who had a "boxer's physique". She had recognised the "priest" as Archbishop Marcinkus, but De Pedis had warned her to "forget all about it" and had threatened to kidnap her own daughter unless she held her tongue.

Archbishop Marcinkus, born in Cicero, Illinois, to Lithuanian immigrants, rose in the Vatican hierarchy to become head of the Vatican bank from 1971 to 1989. He was implicated in the collapse of the Vatican and Mafia linked Banco Ambrosiano, headed by Mr Calvi, who in 1982 was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London, allegedly murdered.

Corriere della Sera carried photographs of the basement of a building not far from the Vatican in which, according to Ms Minardi, the kidnapped girl was held prisoner. It was used as an air raid shelter during the Second World War.

Natalina Orlandi, the missing woman's sister, told Il Messaggero that the theory that the kidnap was linked to the attempt on the life of John Paul II and the theory that it had to do with the Magliana gang were "not mutually exclusive".

However Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, a veteran Vatican official, said that he did not believe the kidnapping was linked to the attempt on the Pope's life. He said he wondered why, if Emanuela was still alive, there had been no attempt in 25 years to contact her family.

Antonio Mancini, a former member of the Magliana gang turned "pentito" (supergrass), said he believed that the kidnapping was connected to financial dealings between the gang, the Vatican and Roberto Calvi, and specifically to events surrounding the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano.

Otello Lupacchini, a judge who investigated both the Calvi affair and the Magliana gang, said that De Pedis had "invested" in the Banco Ambrosiano and may have abducted Ms Orlandi to put pressure on Calvi and the Vatican Bank to help him retrieve "unpaid debts". However the idea that Marcinkus had ordered the abduction was "fantasy".

Massimo Krogh and Nicoletta Piromallo, lawyers for the Orlandi family, dismissed Ms Minardi's testimony as "unreliable." The Italian journalists union protested after police raided the offices of AGI, the Italian news agency which first disclosed details of Ms Minardi's evidence. Police said that the leaked testimony could damage the inquiry, but the union said it was "the duty of journalists in a democracy to reveal the truth".

Times Recommends

• Times Charity Appeal: SolarAid
• Is it Black Monday all over again for Dubai?
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal