REPORT ISSUED ON DEATHS OF SWISS GUARDS

VATICAN CITY, Feb. 8 -- Marijuana and a brain cyst may have impaired the
reasoning of a Swiss Guardsman who fatally shot his commander and the
commander's wife here last May, then took his own life, Vatican officials
said.

Closing the books on the first killings within Vatican precincts in 150
years, the officials said a nine-month probe into the incident led
investigators to the same conclusion they expressed at the time: That
Cedric Tornay, 23, shot Col. Alois Estermann and his wife, Gladys, in their
Vatican apartment with his service revolver before killing himself --
dismissing the possibility of other suspects and ruling out a conspiracy.

But for the first time, the Vatican disclosed 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 said an autopsy
revealed a cyst the size of a pigeon's egg in Tornay's brain.

Nothing in the 10-page report materially altered the Vatican's initial
explanation of the May 4 slayings: That the guardsman was driven by hatred
of the newly appointed commander and that he carried out the killings in a
fit of anger over Estermann's refusal to give him a medal.

A report in a Swiss newspaper Sunday quoted Tornay's mother as claiming
that all three were victims of a plot and that her son was wrongly accused
"in the attempt to hide a probably unconfessable truth."

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."

The Swiss Guard, the pope's picturesquely attired personal security force,
was founded in 1506 and draws volunteer recruits from among young Swiss
Catholic men, generally army veterans.