VATICAN PROBE BLAMES GUARDSMAN

VATICAN CITY (AP) Smoking marijuana and a brain cyst may have impaired the
reasoning of a disgruntled Swiss Guard who killed his commander and the
man's wife in May, the Vatican said Monday.

Closing the books on the first murders in the Vatican in 150 years, the
Vatican said 23-year-old Cedric Tornay shot the couple with his service
revolver before killing himself.

The nine-month investigation reached the same conclusion expressed
immediately after the shocking slayings of Col. Alois Estermann and his
wife, dismissing the possibility of other suspects and leaving no room for
conspiracy theories.

The report was based on a series of ballistic and other technical tests,
autopsies and 38 interviews.

For the first time, the Vatican reported evidence that Tornay was a
marijuana smoker and said it could not rule out that he was a chronic drug
user, which "would further explain his behavior."

It also disclosed the autopsy found a cyst the size of a pigeon's egg in
Tornay's brain.

Nothing in the 10-page report shook the Vatican's initial scenario after
the May 4 slayings: that the guardsman was driven by his hatred for the
newly named commander and that he burst into the Vatican apartment in a fit
of anger over the commander's refusal to give him a medal.

Lying next to the bodies of Estermann, 43, and Estermann's Venezuelan-born
wife, Gladys Meza Romero, 49, was the body of Tornay.

In a report from Switzerland, Il Messaggero on Sunday quoted Tornay's
mother, Muguette Baudat, as claiming all three were victims of a plot, and
that her son was wrongly accused "in the attempt to hide a probably
unconfessable truth."

The mother, who didn't provide details, said her lawyers were waiting to
see the official conclusions before counterattacking.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said he understood the mother's
grief "but that the results of the investigation are what they are and the
reality can't be canceled."