KGB plotted to kill Pope: documents
ROME, March 30: With world media attention focused on the deteriorating health of the Pope Joh Paul II - who on Wednesday waved a blessing to the crowds in St Peter's Square, but did not speak - new details have emerged about the role of former Communist states in the attempt to assassinate him 24 years ago.
John Paul II was shot in the stomach by a Turkish terrorist in Saint Peter's Square on May 13, 1981. According to a report in Italian daily Corriere della Sera, recently-declassified documents confirm that the attack was ordered by the KGB, organized by the Bulgarian secret services and carried out by Turkish terrorists, with the East German secret services directing the whole operation and subsequent cover-up.
The paper cited documents which the German government has uncovered in the archives of the Stasi, the feared former secret service of communist East Germany, and which have now been handed over to Bulgaria.
A Bulgarian spokesman confirmed they had the files. He also said they would be made accessible to an Italian parliamentary commission, which has a mandate to look into the activity of Eastern bloc secret agents in Italy.
The shots which pierced the Pope's abdomen, and required extensive surgery, were fired by Ali Agca, a member of the radical right-wing Turkish terrorist group, the Grey Wolves, who was captured immediately afterwards.
Mehmet Ali Agca first claimed he was commissioned by Bulgaria on the orders of the Soviet KGB. Agca later recanted, but suspicions continued about a Bulgarian connection, involving secret services of the then Communist bloc, who feared the Polish Pope's influence on the global stage.
In his book, 'Memory and Identity', the Pope, who has personally forgiven Agca and visited him in jail, wrote: "the attack was not his (Agca's) initiative, there was someone else who masterminded it and someone else who commissioned it".
In a recent interview, an Italian magistrate who investigated the assassination attempt, Ferdinando Imposimato, said he was convinced that "the attack was ordered by the KGB which allotted the job to their "brothers" in the secret services of East Germany and Bulgaria"
"When the attack failed", Imposimato told Italian weekly Oggi, "the second phase kicked in. This involved blackmailing the Pope and President Sandro Pertini to free Agca who was in jail and had started confessing".
It was this, Imposimato argued, that led to the still unresolved disappearance of Emanuela Orlandi, the teenage daughter of a Vatican official. Imposimato said that through his discussions with Markus Wolf, the feared commander of the Stasi, the assassination plot was hatched in 1979 during a meeting between Soviet foreign Minister, Andrej Gromiko, the right hand man of Soviet leader Leonard Breshnev, who reassured Polish officials fearful about the impact of their countryman, Karol Wotyla, now head of the Roman Catholic church, saying: "The problem will soon be resolved". -By arrangement with AKI.
AI
