The Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II nearly 30 years ago is to be released from prison today Monday and has raised hopes that he will finally shed light on whether the assassination attempt was a KGB plot.
Mehmet Ali Agca, 52, said last week that he would “answer all questions” about the murder attempt after his release. When he was arrested minutes after the attack on St Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, he claimed that he had acted alone.
In confused, often rambling testimony, he later indicated that Bulgarian agents acting on behalf of Moscow were behind the attack, but then withdrew this.
John Paul II met and forgave Agca, a former member of the Turkish far-right Grey Wolves, in his cell in 1983 while the gunman was serving a 19-year sentence in an Italian high-security prison. Agca was pardoned in 2000 and returned to Turkey, where he was immediately re-arrested and given a ten-year prison sentence for murdering a Turkish newspaper editor in 1979.
Italian magistrates who investigated the atack on the Pope remain convinced that there was a Soviet plot, arising from Moscow’s fears that an anti-communist revolt in his native Poland would bring down the entire Soviet system.
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In 1986 an Italian jury acquitted six defendants — three Bulgarians and three Turks — accused of involvement in the plot for lack of evidence. Yesterday Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, who was the Vatican’s Foreign Minister at the time of the attack, said that John Paul had “become convinced that the origins of the plot lay in the Soviet bloc”.
The Vatican “had the impression that Agca was a pawn in a game much bigger than him, and did not know much”, Cardinal Silvestrini told La Stampa. “Even now I doubt if he will say anything concrete.”
Haci Ali Ozhan, Agca’s Turkish lawyer, said that his client hoped to to travel to Rome to pay his respects at the tomb of John Paul II and meet Pope Benedict XVI but arrangements had not been finalised with the Vatican. Meanwhile, he would take a fortnight’s holiday.
Mr Ozhan said that Agca had received more than 50 book, film and television documentary offers from around the world and would decide which to take up “one or two months after his release”. In a statement last week, Agca, who in the past has claimed to be a Messiah, called for a “new American empire” championing peace and democracy, adding: “Terrorism is the evil of Devil. All religions prohibit and condemn terrorism. Al-Qaeda is a psychopathic criminal Nazi organisation.”