Pubdate: 3 Mar 1999
Source: Times, The (UK)
Copyright: 1999 Times Newspapers Ltd
Contact:  http://www.the-times.co.uk/
Author: Richard Owen in Rome

Our Newshawk writes: I have forwarded this story since the report issued by
the Vatican last month suggested that "Smoking marijuana...may have
impaired the reasoning" of Cedric Tornay -
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n145.a07.html

SWISS TO TEST STORY OF GUARD'S SUICIDE

THE Swiss authorities are to exhume the body of a young member of the Swiss
Guards who murdered his commanding officer last year, according to Italian
press reports.

Il Messaggero said Swiss magistrates had agreed to a request by Muguette
Bauday-Tornay, the mother of Vice-Corporal Cedric Tornay, for her son's
body to be exhumed so that experts could establish whether the Vatican's
version of the tragedy was correct.

Last month the Vatican released its nine-month inquiry which concluded that
Tornay, 23, had shot dead Colonel Alois Estermann, 44, and his wife,
Gladys, 49, in a "fit of madness" in May after being passed over for
promotion and military honours. He then killed himself.

But his mother, who lives in Switzerland, said she believed her son had
been framed. One theory says there was a plot inside the Vatican to kill
Estermann, said by German papers to have been an agent for East Germany
before the fall of communism. He was killed the day he became the new Swiss
Guards commander.

According to the official report, Tornay shot himself through the mouth.
But his mother said a new post-mortem examination could prove whether the
trajectory of the bullet was consistent with suicide, or whether it showed
he had been murdered.

Gianluigi Marrone, the Vatican lawyer who conducted the inquiry, said he
was confident any examination of Tornay's body would confirm the Vatican
account. 
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MAP posted-by: Mike Gogulski