NEWS STORY: Italian President Pardons Pope’s Attempted Assassin

c. 2000 Religion News Service ROME _ Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi granted a pardon Tuesday (June 13) to Mehmet Ali Agca, the right-wing Turkish terrorist who shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square 19 years ago. Minister of Justice Piero Fassino, who had recommended the pardon,immediately signed an order […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

ROME _ Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi granted a pardon Tuesday (June 13) to Mehmet Ali Agca, the right-wing Turkish terrorist who shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square 19 years ago.

Minister of Justice Piero Fassino, who had recommended the pardon,immediately signed an order extraditing Agca, 42, to Turkey to serve the remainder of an eight- to 15-year sentence for assassinating a newspaper editor in 1979.


Agca opened fire on the pontiff in the early evening of May 13, 1981, as John Paul rode through St. Peter’s Square in an open car at the start of his weekly general audience. John Paul suffered severe abdominal wounds and underwent two operations in Gemelli Hospital in Rome. A woman from Buffalo, N.Y., also was seriously wounded, but she too recovered.

The pope pardoned his assailant just four days after the shooting from his hospital bed in Rome and visited him in prison in 1983.

Reports Tuesday from the Adriatic coastal city of Ancona, where Agca has been held in a maximum-security prison, said a plane was standing by to fly him to Turkey Tuesday night.

Turgut Kazan, a lawyer for the Turkish victim’s family, told the Italian news agency ANSA that Agca probably would benefit from a 1991 amnesty law. Agca’s brother Adnan said Agca would have to serve eight years under that amnesty but a new amnesty before Parliament would cut the sentence to between three and five years.

The Ministry of Justice said the Italian government acted with the approval of the Vatican.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the Holy See learned of the decision “with satisfaction.” He said the pope had recently renewed his recommendation that Agca be pardoned and was particularly pleased that the Italian government acted during Holy Year.

John Paul gave his personal forgiveness to Agca during a dramatic visit to his cell in Rome’s Rebibbia Prison on Dec. 27, 1983.


“For me this is truly a dream,” Agca told his lawyer, Marina Magistrelli, when she informed him of the pardon. “I can’t believe it. I give thanks to the Holy Father and to the Vatican.” He has served 19 years and one month in Italian prisons.

Judge Rasario Priore, who headed the investigation into Agca’s attempt on the pope’s life, called the pardon the only possible end to “a long and sad case.” He said he disagreed with those who believed that keeping Agca in prison would force him to finally tell the truth.

“Ali Agca furnished many and diverse versions of the facts,” Priore said. “I believe that while he did not know everything, he may have perceived something of what was going on.”

After he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in a three-day trial in July 1981, Agca claimed that he acted on the orders of the Bulgarian Embassy, which was relaying instructions from the KGB.

The attempt was seen as a Cold War plot to eliminate John Paul because of the support he had given the Solidarity free labor movement in his native Poland since his election on Oct. 16, 1978.

Agca implicated as his contacts three Turks, Oral Celik, Omar Bagci and Abdullah Katli; the former Rome station chief of Balcan Air, Sergei Antonov; and two employees of the Bulgarian Embassy, Teodor Ayvazov, the cashier, and Vassillev Kolev, secretary to the military attache.


Two more trials failed to convict any of them.

“I am convinced that Agca did not act alone, that in St. Peter’s Square there were other accomplices who, however, abandoned him,” said Antonio Marini, who was prosecutor at the trials.

“The bitterness of not having succeeded in bringing this case to full light remains,” Marini said. He said the case “will very probably remain veiled in mystery.”

At various times, Agca also linked his attempt to kill the pope to the still unsolved mystery over the 1983 disappearances from Rome of two teen-aged girls, one of them, Emmanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee.

Agca also alluded to the so-called Third Secret of Fatima and claimed to be a new Messiah and a “reincarnation of Jesus Christ.” During his third pilgrimage to Fatima in May, on the 19th anniversary of the shooting, the pope ordered the secret disclosed, and it appeared to describe Agca’s attack. The Vatican has said it will issue the full text soon.

In Turkey, Agca was a member of the Grey Wolves, an extreme right-wing terrorist organization with links to the Turkish Mafia. The Grey Wolves have since become a political party with seats in the Turkish Parliament.

Convicted of assassinating Abdo Ipekci, editor of the progressive daily Milliyet, on Feb. 1, 1979, Agca was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted. On Nov. 25, he escaped from a maximum-security prison with the help of the Grey Wolves and surfaced 18 months later in Rome when he shot the pope.


Four days after he was shot, the pope said during a broadcast of the Sunday Angelus prayer from the hospital that he pardoned his assailant. In addition to visiting Agca in prison, John Paul gave his mother and brother audiences at the Vatican in 1994 and 1996 and the brother again in 1997.

“As has been noted,” the Vatican spokesman said in a statement Tuesday, “John Paul II immediately pardoned his would-be assassin. Some time ago, the pope communicated to the Italian authorities that he was favorable to an act of clemency under the provisions of the Italian judicial system. This wish was renewed recently.”

Referring to the custom, dating to the time of the Old Testament, of granting pardons during Jubilee years, the spokesman said the pope was pleased that Agca received a pardon during Holy Year 2000.

“The concession of pardon coming during the Jubilee makes the Holy Father’s personal satisfaction all the more intense,” the spokesman said.

KRE END POLK

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