Hopes of finding the remains of a missing Vatican teenager in the tombs of two 19th-century German princesses have been dashed.

Coroners and medical technicians swarmed the crypt of a Roman basilica to exhume the body of a reputed mobster as part of an investigation into one of the Vatican’s enduring mysteries: the 1983 disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the teenage daughter of a Vatican employee.