The Turkish attacker who shot Pope John Paul I in 1981 will be released from prison in his homeland soon.
Mehmet Ali Agca, Turkish gunman who shot Pope John Paul II.
Reports yesterday from Turkey's Anatolian state news agency that Mehmet Ali Agca (48) would be released from prison this month were splashed across Italian papers today.
An Italian magistrate said Agca's life might be in danger after his release because of the secrets he knows.
Agca served 19 years of a life sentence in Italy for the assassination attempt before being pardoned at the late Pope's behest in 2000. He was then extradited to Turkey to serve a separate sentence in an Istanbul jail for robbery and murder.
The Pope almost died from wounds to his abdomen, but doctors saved his life, mainly because the bullets missed vital organs. He publicly forgave Agca four days after the shooting and again when he visited his assailant in a Rome prison in 1983.
But nearly 25 years after the shooting in St Peter's Square on May 13th, 1981, the question over who might have been really behind the assassination attempt remains an enduring mystery.
"I am convinced that once free, Agca's life might be in grave danger because he knows many truths about the plot against John Paul," Ferdinando Imposimato, who worked as a magistrate in Rome in the 1980s, was quoted by Italian media as saying.
Agca was arrested in St Peter's Square minutes after the shooting, and a court sentenced him to life imprisonment two months later.
At a 1986 trial, prosecutors failed to prove charges that Bulgarian secret services had hired Agca to kill the Pope on behalf of the Soviet Union. The so-called "Bulgarian Connection" trial ended with an "acquittal for lack of sufficient evidence" of three Turks and three Bulgarians charged with conspiring along with Agca.
But the verdict, a quirk of the Italian judicial system, fell short of a full acquittal. It meant the jury was not fully convinced of the defendants' innocence but that there was not enough evidence for a guilty verdict.
Agca belonged to a right-wing militant faction in Turkey in the late 1970s and was sentenced to prison for the murder of a liberal newspaper editor in 1979. He then escaped from jail with suspected help from right-wing sympathisers in the Turkish security apparatus.
Turkish authorities have always denied any connection with Agca and have dismissed him as mentally unstable.