Attempted murder of Jean-Paul II of May 13rd, 1981

The May 13rd 1981, Mehmet Ali Ağca, member of the nationalist organization Turkish of the gray Wolves , tried to assassinate the Pape Jean-Paul II, on the Place Saint-Pierre with Rome. According to a Italian parliamentary commission, it would have acted of a plot warped by several States of the Communist bloc. theses conspirationnists were also emitted.

The attack

The May 13rd 1981, Turkish Mehmet Ali Ağca shot twice at the Polish pope Jean-Paul II, but was quickly controlled by the crowd and the security services of the pope. Ağca was condemned in Italy to the life imprisonment but was released after 19 years of captivity then imprisoned in Turkey. Shortly after the attempted murder, in Christmas 1983, Jean Paul II had visited him in prison. After a private conversation, the pope had declared: That of which we spoke will remain a secrecy between him and me. I spoke to him as with a brother with whom I forgave and who have my whole confidence. .

Mehmet Ali Ağca had affirmed that Serguei Antonov had provided him the gun with which it had seriously wounded Jean-Paul II and who Serguei Antonov, which was a person in charge of the Roman office of the airline company Balkan Air, had acted on behalf of the Bulgarian secret services. But Serguei Antonov had been discharged in 1986 for “insufficiency of evidence”. These charges were however never proven, even with the opening of the files of the Bulgarian communist secret services in 1989; and the Bulgarian State, which had always proclaimed its innocence, granted to him in a 2002 “pension for exceptional merits”.

During a lawsuit in Turkey, Abdullah Çatlı, another member of the Gray Wolves , affirmed to have given itself the weapon to Ağca. Ağca was released on word in January 2006.

Responsibility

Official thesis of the “Mitrokhine commission”: the USSR, Bulgaria and GDR

The senator Paolo Guzzanti, member of Forza Italia , declared on March 2nd, 2006 that the attack against Jean-Paul II had been decided by the former Soviet leader Léonid Brejnev, then implemented by the military authorities of the USSR. The GRU, Soviet secret service, would have then carried out an allocation of the functions . In this operation, the Bulgarian services would have served as “cover” while the Stasi, the East-German secret police, would have been charged with the “Désinformation”.

Paolo Guzzanti was based with the first chief on the report, published in 2006, of the “commission Mitrokhine”, Italian parliamentary commission which it had chaired and charged with inquiring into the activities of the communist secret services in Italy during the Cold war. The commission held its name of Vassili Mitrokhine, an ex-agent of the KGB on the files of which it had mainly rested. To support its remarks, Guzzanti also quoted the French antiterrorist judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, which would have entrusted in October 2004 to him to have acquired the conviction that the attack made by Ali Agca against the pope on May 13rd, 1981 had been the work of the GRU.

However, at the time of a voyage in Bulgaria in May 2002, Jean-Paul II had declared that he had never believed in the track of “Bulgarian connection”, already at the time constant by Michael Ledeen. The Bulgaria and the the USSR formally denied to be implied in this attempted murder, just as Markus Wolf, former Master-spy of the Stasi.

Alternative thesis accusing Gladio

According to diplomatic Le Monde , the group of the gray Loups , to which Mehmet Ali Ağca belongbelonged, “was handled” by Gladio, network “ Stay-behind ” of the NATO which aimed during the Cold war at preparing a “Guérilla” in the event of invasion Soviet, but suspected in Italy, Greece and Turkey to have practiced attacks “ False flag ” aiming at discrediting the extreme left.

According to this assumption, the attempted murder would have had like objective to revive the Stratégie of the tension in Italy, the last famous attack being that of the Attentat of the station of Bologna in 1980. diplomatic Le Monde underlines thus that Mehmet Ali Ağca was helped by Abdullah Çatlı, another member of the gray Wolves and notorious member of Gladio. The journalist Lucy Komisar supports the same thesis, while the historian Daniele Ganser showed, in his book on Gladio published in 2005, the bonds proven between the Gray Wolves, the CIA and Counter-Guerilla, the Turkish branch of Gladio.

In the popular culture

This attempted murder in particular inspired the American writer Tom Clancy for his novel Red Rabbit and it represented in the last episode of the Manga Chrno crusade .

References

Sources

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