Full light has not been shed on the May 13 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, assailant Ali Agca told ANSA as the world remembers the 40th anniversary of the two shots in St Peter’s Square that rang around the world.
“Certainly full light has not been shed on the attack on Pope John Paul II,” said the former ‘grey wolf’, who lives in Turkey after his pardon for the attack and having served out a term for the 1979 assassination of leftwing journalist Abdi İpekçi.
“However, the Italian parliament’s Mitrokhin commission did discover some truths” about those behind the attack.
“Furthermore, KGB Major Victor Ivanovich Sheymov had already confessed something about the attempt on the Polish pope’s life.
But many people’s memories are fading in a world full of events, naturally”.
Agca, 22 at the time of the attack, was forgiven by John Paul immediately afterwards and also when they met in prison in 1983.
Senator Paolo Guzzanti, who led the commission on the Mitrokhin Dossier from 2002 to 2006, said immediately after the attack of 13 May 1981 to Pope John Paul II, confessed everything to the Italian magistrates who heard him, giving the exact reconstruction of having been hired as a killer by the Bulgarian services, but then – intimidated in prison by two military magistrates who came from Bulgaria – he considered himself crazy and his version could no longer be used.
Meanwhile on Thursday, two Polish cardinal said Mass in the Vatican basilica to mark the 40th anniversary of the attempt on the life of Polish Pope John Paul II by Turkish would-be assassin Ali Agca.
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, archbishop of Krakow and former particular secretary to Pope John Paul II, and Papal Almoner Cardinal Konrad Krajewski officiated at the ceremony near the late pope and saint’s tomb.
Main Photo: A picture dated 27 December 1983 in Rome showing Pope John Paul II meeting in a prison Ali Agca, a Turk who shot and wounded him on St. Peter Square in May 1981.EPA PHOTO FILES ANSA/-/ao/BW
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