Soviets 'ordered Pope shooting'

[Rrose_Selavy]

Soviets 'ordered Pope shooting'
An Italian parliamentary commission has concluded that the former Soviet Union was behind the 1981 assassination attempt on the late Pope John Paul II.
The head of the commission, Paolo Guzzanti, said it was sure beyond "reasonable doubt" that Soviet leaders ordered the shooting.

Turkish national Mehmet Ali Agca, now 48, shot the Pope in St Peter's Square on 13 May 1981, hitting him four times.

Agca never gave a motive, and mystery has continued to surround the shooting.

A link between Agca and Bulgarian agents, and through them to the Soviet Union's KGB, has been the subject of speculation over the years.

Solidarity links

The commission released the final draft of its report to journalists on Thursday.

"This commission believes, beyond all reasonable doubt, that the leaders of the USSR took the initiative to eliminate Pope Karol Wojtyla," the report said.


Soviet leaders "communicated this decision to the military secret service in order that it carry out the necessary operations", it continued.

The commission said the Soviet Union felt the Pope was a danger because of his support for the democracy-linked Solidarity labour movement in Poland, his native country.

It also said that it had photographic evidence showing a Bulgarian man, one of six men acquitted in 1986 of orchestrating the assassination attempt, was in St Peter's Square at the time of the shooting.

The findings came from a commission set up to investigate Cold War secrets revealed by Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who defected to the UK in 1992.

Agca served nearly 20 years in an Italian jail for the crime. He is currently in prison in Turkey for the murder of a journalist.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/w ... 767652.stm

Published: 2006/03/02 17:02:51 GMT

© BBC MMVI

 

[ramonmercado]

History Today suggests that it was the GRU (Military Intelligence) who caried out this attack.

Italian Parliamentary commission implicates GRU in Pope assassination plot

A Roman prosecutor is poised to recommence his investigation on the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II on May 13th 1981, following an Italian Parliamentary commission’s claim that the attack was part of a Soviet military secret service plot. Mehmet Ali Agca, who shotthe late pontiff, was acting in accordance with a plan masterminded by the GRU- rivals to the KGB- on the orders of the politburo and general secretary of the Communist party, Leonid Brezhnev, claims the commission. Its president, Paolo Guzzanti, said last week that it had come to a “categorical conclusion” that the GRU received the order to murder the Pope directly from the politburo and probably from Brezhnev himself. One of the Italian magistrates who investigated the attack, Ferdinando Imposimato, believes that the Soviet Union was implicated- though this fact has never been proved in court. He is, however unconvinced that it was a GRU plot and believes instead that the infamous terrorist Carlos the Jackal was involved in the assassination preparations. A spokesman for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service branded the allegations as “completely absurd.” Agca was convicted of attemptedmurder and was imprisoned in Italy until 2000. In 1983 he was visited by the Pope in his Italian prison cell and forgiven. He is now being held in Turkey. (March 13th)
Charlie Cottrell

GRU