On 13 May 1981, in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City, Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded by Mehmet Ali Ağca while he was entering the square. The Pope was struck twice and suffered severe blood loss. Ağca was apprehended immediately and later sentenced to life in prison by an Italian court. The Pope forgave Ağca for the assassination attempt. He was pardoned by Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi at the Pope's request and was deported to Turkey in June 2000.
Background
In 1979, The New York Times reported that Ağca, whom it called "the self-confessed killer of an Istanbul newspaperman" (Abdi İpekçi, editor of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet), had described the Pope as "the masked leader of the crusades" and threatened to shoot him if he did not cancel his planned visit to Turkey, which went ahead in late November 1979. The paper also said (on 28 November 1979) that the killing would be in revenge for the then still ongoing attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca, which had begun on 20 November, and which he blamed on the United States or Israel.
Beginning in August 1980, Ağca, under the alias of Vilperi, began criss-crossing the Mediterranean region, altering passports and identities, perhaps to hide his point of origin in Sofia, Bulgaria. He entered Rome on 10 May 1981, coming by train from Milan. According to Ağca's later testimony, he met with three accomplices in Rome, one a fellow Turk and two Bulgarians, with the operation being commanded by Zilo Vassilev, the Bulgarian military attaché in Italy. He said that he was assigned this mission by Turkish mafioso Bekir Çelenk in Bulgaria. According to Ağca, the plan was for him and the back-up gunman Oral Çelik to open fire on the pope in St. Peter's Square and escape to the Bulgarian embassy under the cover of the panic generated by a small explosion.
Attempted assassination
On 13 May, Ağca was sitting in the square, writing postcards and waiting for the Pope to arrive. When the Pope passed through a crowd of supporters, Ağca fired four shots at 17:17 with a 9mm Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol, and seriously wounded him. He fled the scene as the crowd was in shock and disposed of the pistol by throwing it under a truck, but was grabbed by Vatican security chief Camillo Cibin, a nun, and several spectators who prevented him from firing more shots or escaping, and he was arrested. Two bullets hit John Paul II: one struck his torso, narrowly missing vital organs, and a second hit his left index finger. Two bystanders were also injured: Ann Odre, of Buffalo, New York, was struck in the chest, and Rose Hall, of Massachusetts, was slightly wounded in the arm. The Pope was immediately rushed to the hospital while the authorities combed the site for evidence. Çelik panicked and fled without opening fire.
Health effects
The 1981 assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II had a significant impact on his health, the extent to which was unknown by the general public at the time. Rushed to the Agostino Gemelli University Polyclinic to undergo emergency surgery, the pope experienced profound bleeding leading to a dangerous fall in blood pressure and to cardiac arrest, which was successfully defibrillated. He received the Anointing of the Sick (formerly known as "Last Rites"). Despite difficulties with extensive blood transfusions, which are speculated to have transmitted a cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection, the surgery was eventually successful. A bullet had passed completely through the body, puncturing the intestines and necessitating a colostomy. Seven weeks later, discussions were held about reversing the colostomy and eight of nine doctors voted against it, arguing the pope was still too weak from the CMV infection. Saying "I don't want to continue half dead and half alive", the pope effectively overruled his physicians and the reversal was done successfully on August 5, 1981. The operation was performed by Francesco Crucitti, the personal surgeon of the Pope. He also lead the team of surgeons that performed surgery on the Pope on the day of the assassination attempt.
Incarceration of Ağca
Ağca was sentenced in July 1981 to life imprisonment for the assassination attempt, but was pardoned by Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in June 2000 at the Pope's request. He was then extradited to Turkey, where he was imprisoned for the 1979 murder of left-wing journalist Abdi İpekçi and two bank raids carried out in the 1970s. Despite a plea for early release in November 2004, a Turkish court announced that he would not be eligible for release until 2010. Nonetheless, he was released on parole on 12 January 2006. However, on 20 January 2006, the Turkish Supreme Court ruled that his time served in Italy could not be deducted from his Turkish sentence and he was returned to jail. Ağca was released from prison on 18 January 2010, after almost 29 years behind bars.
Relationship with Pope John Paul II
Following the shooting, Pope John Paul II asked people to "pray for my brother [Ağca] ... whom I have sincerely forgiven." In 1983, he and Ağca met and spoke privately at Rome's Rebibbia Prison, where Ağca was being held. Ağca reportedly kissed the Pope's ring at the conclusion of their visit; some mistakenly thought the Pope was hearing Ağca's confession. The Pope was also in touch with Ağca's family over the years, meeting his mother in 1987 and his brother, Muezzin Ağca, a decade later.
Despite Ağca's assassination attempt, and being quoted as saying that "to me [the Pope] was the incarnation of all that is capitalism" and attempted to murder him, Ağca developed a friendship with the pontiff. In early February 2005, during the Pope's illness, Ağca sent a letter to the Pope wishing him well.
In 2014, 33 years after his crime, Ağca visited Vatican City to lay white roses on the tomb of the recently canonised John Paul II, and said he wanted to meet Pope Francis, a request that was denied.
Motivations for the assassination attempt
Several theories exist concerning Ağca's assassination attempt. One, which was initially propagated in the American media and strongly advocated since the early 1980s by Michael Ledeen and Claire Sterling among others, was that the assassination attempt had originated from Moscow and that the KGB had instructed the Bulgarian and East German secret services to carry out the mission. The Bulgarian Secret Service was allegedly instructed by the KGB to assassinate the Pope because of his support of Poland's Solidarity movement, seeing it as one of the most significant threats to Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman instead term this as the spread of "disinformation as news" in their book Manufacturing Consent (1988), as they say there was no evidence to support this claim, while Wolfgang Achtner of The Independent dubbed it "one of the most successful cases—certainly the most publicized—of disinformation."
Ağca himself has given multiple conflicting statements on the assassination at different times. Attorney Antonio Marini stated: "Ağca has manipulated all of us, telling hundreds of lies, continually changing versions, forcing us to open tens of different investigations." Originally, Ağca claimed to be a member of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), but they denied any ties to him.
"Bulgarian Connection"
Following the assassination attempt, Ağca made claims while in custody that prior to the attempt, he had made several trips to Sofia, Bulgaria, where he claimed to have had contacts with a Bulgarian agent in Rome whose cover was the Bulgarian national airline office. Soon after the shooting, Sergei Antonov, a Bulgarian working in Rome for Balkan Air, was arrested based on Ağca's testimony and accused of being the Bulgarian agent who masterminded the plot. In 1986, after a three-year trial, he was found not guilty.
According to the CIA's chief of staff in Turkey, Paul Henze, Ağca later stated that in Sofia, he was once approached by the Bulgarian Secret Service and Turkish mafiosi, who offered him three million German marks to assassinate the Pope. Some writers, including Edward S. Herman, co-author with Frank Brodhead of The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (1986), and Michael Parenti, believed Ağca's story was dubious as Ağca made no claims of Bulgarian involvement until he had been isolated in solitary confinement and visited by Italian Military Intelligence (SISMI) agents. On 25 September 1991, former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman (now Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy) claimed that his colleagues, following orders, had falsified their analysis to support the accusation. He declared to the US Senate intelligence committee that "the CIA hadn't any proof" concerning this alleged "Bulgarian connection".
Neither the Severino Santiapichi court nor the investigation by Judge Franco Ionta found evidence that SISMI planted Ağca's story. A French lawyer, Christian Roulette, who authored books blaming Western intelligence agencies for the assassination attempt, testified in court that the documentary evidence he referred to actually did not exist.
Grey Wolves
Le Monde diplomatique alleged that Abdullah Çatlı, a leader of the Grey Wolves, had organised the assassination attempt "in exchange for the sum of 3 million German Marks" for the Grey Wolves.
In Rome, Çatlı declared to the judge in 1985 "that he had been contacted by the BND, the German intelligence agency, which would have promised him a nice sum of money if he implicated the Russian and Bulgarian services in the assassination attempt against the Pope". According to Colonel Alparslan Türkeş, the founder of the Grey Wolves, "Çatlı has cooperated in the frame of a secret service working for the good of the state".
Mitrokhin Commission's claims
According to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, documents recovered from former East German intelligence services confirm the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II was ordered by the Soviet KGB and assigned to Bulgarian and East German agents with the Stasi to coordinate the operation and cover up the traces afterwards. Markus Wolf, former Stasi spy-master, denied any links, and stated that the files had already been sent in 1995.
In March 2006, pending the 2006 Italian general election held in April, the controversial Mitrokhin Commission, set up by Silvio Berlusconi and headed by Forza Italia senator Paolo Guzzanti, supported once again the Bulgarian theory, which John Paul II had denounced during his travel to Bulgaria. Guzzanti stated that "leaders of the former Soviet Union were behind the assassination attempt", alleging that "the leadership of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate Pope John Paul" because of his support for Solidarity, relaying "this decision to the military secret services" and not the KGB. The report's claims were based on recent computer analysis of photographs that purported to demonstrate Antonov's presence in St Peter's Square during the shooting and on information brought by the French anti-terrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, a controversial figure whose last feat was to indict Rwandese president Paul Kagame, on the grounds that he had deliberately provoked the 1994 Rwandan genocide against his own ethnic group in order to take power. According to Le Figaro, Bruguière, who was in close contacts with both Moscow and Washington, D.C., including intelligence agents, was accused by many of his colleagues of "privileging the reason of state over law".
Both Russia and Bulgaria condemned the report. Foreign ministry spokesman Dimiter Tzantchev said: "For Bulgaria, this case closed with the court decision in Rome in March 1986.", He recalled the Pope's dismissive comments during his May 2002 visit to Bulgaria. Guzzanti said that the commission had decided to re-open the report's chapter on the assassination attempt in 2005, after the Pope wrote about it in his last book, Memory and Identity. The Pope wrote that he was convinced the shooting was not Ağca's initiative and that "someone else masterminded it and someone else commissioned it". The Mitrokhin Commission also alleged Romano Prodi, a former Prime Minister of Italy, was the "KGB's man in Italy".