The Polish-born pope was seriously wounded on May 13, 1981, in St. Peter’s Square, when Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca fired at him from close range during a general audience.
John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyła in southern Poland, had been elected pope in 1978. His support for human rights and his encouragement of Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement made him one of the most important moral figures of the Cold War.
For many Poles, the attempt on his life remains tied to the struggle against communism, and the pope’s role in strengthening resistance behind the Iron Curtain.
The attack happened at 5:17 p.m., as the pope moved through the crowd in an open vehicle.
Agca, then 23, pulled out a 9 mm Browning pistol and fired two shots. The pope was hit in the abdomen, elbow, and finger. He collapsed in the vehicle as aides tried to hold him up.
Panic broke out in the square. Agca tried to escape into the crowd but was detained by police minutes later.
He shouted in English, “I only, I only,” apparently insisting he had acted alone.
John Paul II was rushed to Rome’s Gemelli hospital in critical condition. Doctors operated on him for more than five hours. The bullet had passed within millimeters of a major artery. He survived after emergency surgery and blood transfusions.
Four days later, speaking from his hospital bed through Vatican Radio, the pope said: “I pray for the brother who wounded me, whom I have sincerely forgiven.”
Agca was a member of the far-right Turkish group Grey Wolves. He had escaped from prison in Turkey, where he was serving a sentence for the 1979 murder of journalist and human rights advocate Abdi Ipekci.
His trial in Rome began in July 1981. Two days later, he was sentenced to life in prison.
In December 1983, John Paul II visited Agca in prison and spoke with him privately.
Agca repeatedly changed his account of the attack. One version led investigators to what became known as the Bulgarian trail, the theory that Bulgarian communist intelligence services, acting on Moscow’s behalf, may have helped organize the shooting.
A trial linked to that theory began in Italy in 1985. Sergei Antonov, a former employee of the Bulgarian airline office in Rome, and two Bulgarian diplomats tried in absentia were cleared because of insufficient evidence.
Agca was pardoned in Italy in 2000 and sent to Turkey, where he continued serving a sentence for Ipekci’s murder.
He was released in 2010 after nearly 30 years in prison.
Suspicions of Soviet involvement have never gone away. The Italian parliament’s Mitrokhin Commission later concluded that Bulgarian services had hired Agca on the orders of Soviet military intelligence, though the findings remained disputed.
In Poland, the investigative division of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) opened its own inquiry in 2006. The institute said Bulgarian intelligence officers had taken part in preparing and carrying out the attack, using figures from the Turkish criminal world, and that available documents pointed to Soviet inspiration in efforts to obscure the trail.
John Paul II described the assassination attempt in his book Memory and Identity as "one of the last convulsions of the 20th-century ideologies of violence."
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP