January 10, 2006	Tuesday	Zilhaj 9, 1426

VATICAN CITY: The Turkish attacker who shot Pope John Paul in 1981 will be released from prison in his homeland soon but the mystery behind one of the 20th century’s most notorious assassination attempts remains.

Reports on Sunday from Turkey’s Anatolian state news agency that Mehmet Ali Agca, 48, would be released from prison this month were splashed across Italian papers on Monday — proof of continued interest in the 1981 shooting during the Cold War.

An Italian magistrate said Agca’s life might be in danger after his release because of the secrets he knows.

Agca served 19 years of a life sentence in Italy for the assassination attempt before being pardoned at the late Pope’s behest in 2000. He was then extradited to Turkey to serve a separate sentence in an Istanbul jail for robbery and murder.

An official Vatican statement said the “decision is in the hands of the courts involved” but Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano betrayed some irritation.

“No one told us anything,” he told Rome’s La Repubblica paper in an interview, saying the Vatican had only heard of it from news agency reports.

Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul’s former secretary who is now archbishop of Krakow in Poland, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper that the late Pope would have approved.

“He is praying for him (Agca) from heaven and I am too,” Dziwisz was quoted as saying.

The Pope almost died from wounds to his abdomen but doctors saved his life, mainly because the bullets missed vital organs. He publicly forgave Agca four days after the shooting and again when he visited his assailant in a Rome prison in 1983.

But nearly 25 years after the shooting in St Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, the question over who might have been really behind the assassination attempt remains an enduring mystery.

“I am convinced that once free, Agca’s life might be in grave danger because he knows many truths about the plot against John Paul,” Ferdinando Imposimato, who worked as a magistrate in Rome in the 1980s, was quoted by Italian media as saying.

At the time of the shooting, events in the Pope’s Polish homeland were starting a domino effect which was to lead to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.

The Pope was a staunch supporter of Poland’s Solidarity union and most historians agree that he had a vital role in events that led to the formation of the East Bloc’s first freely elected government and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Agca was arrested in St Peter’s Square minutes after the shooting and a court sentenced him to life imprisonment two months later.

At a 1986 trial, prosecutors failed to prove charges that Bulgarian secret services had hired Agca to kill the Pope on behalf of the Soviet Union.

The so-called “Bulgarian Connection” trial ended with an “acquittal for lack of sufficient evidence” of three Turks and three Bulgarians charged with conspiring along with Agca. But the verdict, a quirk of the Italian judicial system, fell short of a full acquittal. It meant the jury was not fully convinced of the defendants’ innocence but that there was not enough evidence for a guilty verdict.

Agca belonged to a right-wing militant faction in Turkey in the late 1970s and was sentenced to prison for the murder of a liberal newspaper editor in 1979.

He then escaped from jail with suspected help from right-wing sympathisers in the Turkish security apparatus. Turkish authorities have always denied any connection with Agca and have dismissed him as mentally unstable.—Reuters