Image caption Schoolgirl Emanuela Orlandi went missing in Rome in June 1983 
 
 A former mafia mobster has written to the Pope asking to confess three "very important secrets", including details about one of Italy's most famous missing persons cases, it's been reported. 
 
 In a six-page letter, Vincenzo Calcara says he is "convinced" his confessions "can change the course of certain events", according to La Repubblica newspaper. Calcara was a member of Sicily's Cosa Nostra, before becoming a so-called "pentito", or police collaborator. 
 
 Now he wants to meet Pope Francis one-to-one, apparently to divulge information relating to the disappearance of 15-year-old schoolgirl Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee, who went missing in Rome in 1983, Il Messaggero newspaper reports. 
 
 "The truth on this incident has been kept hidden for years," Calcara writes. "Because to reveal it would be like opening a box and bringing to light truths so weighty as to throw into crisis a system that links the Vatican with other deviant entities." 
 
 At meeting with mafia victims' families in March, Pope Francis warned mafia operatives they would "end up in hell" unless they choose to repent. The speech is considered one of the Vatican's strongest attacks on Italy's organised crime networks. 
 
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 BY BRUCE JOHNSTON IN ROME THE MAFIA WAS behind the assassination plot which left the Pope badly injured in 1991, according to a supergrass. 
 
 Vincenzo Calcara, a turncoat described by Mafia watchers as a serious and reliable collaborator, said Ali Agca, the Turk who shot the Pontiff in St Peter's Square, was a hit-man working for the Mafia. 
 
 Calcara said that Salvatore "Toto" Rina, the Mafia's now jailed Godfather, and Antonio Vaccarino, a former mayor of a small town who has been embroiled in many organised-crime inquiries, were behind the attempt. 
 
 Also working together with them was a man called Antonov, whom the other two later had killed and secretly buried near Milan, Calcara said. 
 
 Magistrates in Sicily have sent transcripts of his testimony to colleagues in Rome; however reports said that a search for a body following the turncoat's indications had produced nothing, adding that investigators had expressed their doubts as to the veracity of the claims. "In the beginning it was said that the Mafia had ordered that the Pope be killed, but there is nothing to suggest that this is true," said Antonio Marini, the prosecutor who handled investigations into the assassination attempt. 
 
 However, Agca did visit Palermo four months before he shot the Pope; and Calcara recently accused a leading Vatican figure and Sicilian criminal exponents of recycling dirty money. Meanwhile, the Mafia's jailed "cashier", Pippo Calo, has become the object of a new arrest warrant. ||||| FILE - In this May 27, 2012, file photo, demonstrators hold pictures of Emanuela Orlandi reading "march for truth and justice for Emanuela" during Pope Benedict XVI's Regina Coeli prayer in St. Peter's... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this May 27, 2012, file photo, demonstrators hold pictures of Emanuela Orlandi reading "march for truth and justice for Emanuela" during Pope Benedict XVI's Regina Coeli prayer in St. Peter's square, at the Vatican. The Vatican says human bones were found during renovation work near its embassy... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this May 27, 2012, file photo, demonstrators hold pictures of Emanuela Orlandi reading "march for truth and justice for Emanuela" during Pope Benedict XVI's Regina Coeli prayer in St. Peter's square, at the Vatican. The Vatican says human bones were found during renovation work near its embassy... (Associated Press) FILE - In this May 27, 2012, file photo, demonstrators hold pictures of Emanuela Orlandi reading "march for truth and justice for Emanuela" during Pope Benedict XVI's Regina Coeli prayer in St. Peter's... (Associated Press) 
 
 VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican said Tuesday that human bones were found during renovation work near its embassy to Italy, reviving talk about one of the Holy See's most enduring mysteries — the fate of the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee who disappeared in 1983. 
 
 In the latest twist in a case that has bedeviled investigators for 35 years, the Vatican said Rome's chief prosecutor had been called in and forensic investigators are working to determine the age and gender of the bones as well as the date of death. 
 
 The Vatican statement didn't mention the girl, Emanuela Orlandi, but Italian media immediately linked her unsolved disappearance to the discovery of the bones. The Vatican said merely that the bones were found during work near its Rome embassy in the upscale residential neighborhood of Parioli. 
 
 Orlandi disappeared after leaving her family's Vatican City apartment to go to a music lesson in Rome. Her father was a lay employee of the Holy See. 
 
 Over the years, her case has been linked to everything from the plot to kill St. John Paul II to the financial scandal of the Vatican bank and Rome's criminal underworld. 
 
 The last major twist in the case came in 2012, when forensic police exhumed the body of a reputed mobster from the crypt of a Roman basilica in hopes of finding Orlandi's remains as well. The search turned up no link. 
 
 More recently, a leading Italian investigative journalist caused a sensation when he published a five-page document last year that had been stolen from a locked Vatican cabinet that suggested the Holy See had been involved in Orlandi's disappearance. The Vatican immediately branded the document a fake, though it never explained what it was doing in the Vatican cabinet. 
 
 The document was purportedly written by a cardinal and listed supposed expenses used for Orlandi's upkeep after she disappeared.
– In what could be one of history's more intriguing cases of a Catholic confessing his sins, a former mobster has asked for a meeting with Pope Francis so he can confess three "very important secrets." Vincenzo Calcara, described by the BBC as a "mafia turncoat" who was a member of Sicily's Cosa Nostra before becoming a police informant, wrote a six-page letter to the pope claiming that what he has to say "can change the course of certain events," according to local media. (This after Pope Francis in March warned mobsters to repent or "end up in hell.") Specifically, he implies he has information about the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the 15-year-old daughter of a Vatican employee. Calcara wrote that what happened has been kept secret "because to reveal it would be like opening a box and bringing to light truths so weighty as to throw into crisis a system that links the Vatican with other deviant entities." It's not Calcara's first run-in with the church: Years ago, he claimed that Ali Agca, who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in a St. Peter's Square shooting in 1991, was a hitman hired by the mafia, according to the Catholic Herald. And in 1994, the AP reported Calcara claimed that a US archbishop who once ran the Vatican bank had helped mobsters launder $6.5 million through the bank. That allegation was denied by the cardinal who ran the Vatican bank at the time.