Claims of a bizarre plot to assassinate Pope Benedict XVI are reverberating through Italy in what observers say signals the latest twist in an increasingly cutthroat internal Vatican power dispute.

Claims of the plot to kill the pope on the front page of
an Italian newspaper in front of St. Peter's basilica in the
Vatican. Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

The Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano published the sensational "mordkomplott" letter detailing an alleged plot against the pope on its front page on Friday. Despite a Vatican spokesman's claiming it was "nonsense not to be taken seriously", the content of the anonymous warning letter, dated December 30, 2011, was reported widely in Italian and German media.

The letter was delivered in early January to the Vatican secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone, and the pope's private secretary, Georg Ganswein, by Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos of Colombia, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. The paper suggested it had been written in German to avoid attracting the attention of certain Vatican officials while communicating clearly and directly with close advisers to the pope, who is German.

Labelled "strictly confidential for the Holy Father", the detailed letter reports several conversations that Cardinal Paolo Romeo, the archbishop of Palermo, allegedly had with Italian businessmen in Beijing on a trip last November during which he predicted the pope would die within 12 months and suggested his replacement would be Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan.

"This seems something so far from reality and not serious that I don't want to even comment," the Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, said when asked for comment by the paper.