Between May and June 1983 in Rome there was a "very high concentration" of missing girls with an average age of 15.9 years in May and 15.6 years in June, in the same area where Emanuela's traces were lost Orlando and Mirella Gregori.

This is the "scientific fact" that emerged from a study commissioned by the lawyer of the Perugia bar Valter Biscotti to carry out two criminologists: Franco Posa, scientific director of the Neurointelligence institute, and Jessica Leone, his collaborator.

The lawyer, a cold case enthusiast, explains that he was "interested out of pure curiosity" in the story of Emanuela Orlandi. On his own initiative he then took over a dossier that the police handed over in 1983 to Domenico Sica, the first magistrate to deal with the case, having the two criminologists conduct the analysis.

A list of 177 missing persons, "all female", 39 of which - it is explained - in "Rome or surroundings" between 1982 and 1983, focusing on 34 cases.

Crime mapping technology was then used to see if there were any links with Orlandi's disappearance in the Vatican area.

According to Posa and Leone, at a maximum distance of about 2.5 kilometers from the place where Emanuela was seen for the last time, there are six cases of disappearance and 15 (including the previous ones), at a maximum of five kilometers in line air from the Vatican City.

For the two criminologists, "of particular technical and scientific significance is the evidence of 16 disappearances which occurred in a period of time between May and June 1983", aged between 14 and 18.

«The interest - explains the study - is motivated by the finding of a high number of cases included in a limited temporal and geographical space, limited to the territory of the municipality of Rome. In the geographical area taken into consideration, 34 cases of disappearance linked to the following factors were identified: age, sex and place. These were female subjects with a total mean age of 15.7 years.

(Unioneonline/lf)