evolution

ROME – Pope John Paul II’s attacker has alleged that Vatican prelates helped him carry out the 1981 shooting in St. Peter’s Square – a claim that was quickly dismissed Thursday by a cardinal.

Mehmet Ali Agca shot John Paul in the abdomen on May 13, 1981, while the pope was riding in an open car. He has given conflicting reasons for the attack, and his motives remain unclear.

“Without the help of priests and cardinals, I would have not been able to carry out that action,” Agca was quoted as saying in an interview Thursday with the Italian daily La Repubblica. “The devil is within the Vatican.”

But in an apparently contradictory remark, Agca also said in the interview that on that morning “nobody in the world knew of my attempt.”

Agca was extradited to Turkey in 2000 after serving almost 20 years in Italy for the shooting, and is now serving time in jail for separate crimes.

“Ali Agca has always sidetracked (investigations) rather that disclosing real facts,” Cardinal Roberto Tucci, a former organizer of papal trips, told Vatican Radio. “One must be very suspicious of his statements.”

Agca did not elaborate on the alleged help he got from inside the Vatican. In 1998, the former East German spy chief said that the agency had planted a mole – a Benedictine monk – at the Vatican.

Ex-Stasi chief Markus Wolf said the mole, a German who worked in the Vatican’s science offices, supplied information on Vatican foreign policy.

However, at the time, both Wolf and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev denied that Soviet-bloc countries had any involvement in the 1981 shooting.

Agca’s latest remarks came as Italian newspapers reported this week that newly discovered documents show the attack on the pope was ordered by the Soviet KGB and organized by the Bulgarian secret service with the help of secret police of former East Germany, the Stasi.

According to Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica, documents found in the archive of the Stasi appear to confirm that Bulgarian agents, acting on the orders of their powerful KGB counterparts, used Agca to carry out the attack, while the Stasi was used to coordinate the operation and cover up traces.

The agency that oversees East Germany’s secret police archives said Thursday that “no obvious findings of involvement by the Stasi, the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB in the 1981 attack on the pope have emerged from documents found to date.”

The agency said a set of Stasi files discovered in 1995 included an exchange between the East German and Bulgarian secret services from the years 1982-85, which started with a request from the Bulgarians to help counter “a campaign by the secret services of our opponents, which are trying to discredit Bulgaria.”

The agency noted that the documents were given to Italian investigators and journalists in the mid-1990s – files that also were later given to Bulgaria. It said the last time it gave Italian authorities documents on the issue was in 1996.

“We must now see what emerges from the Stasi documents. The suspicion is that the Bulgarians were carrying out orders coming from the Soviet KGB,” said Tucci. “But let’s leave the task of examining the papers to magistrates and historians.”

There has long been speculation the assassination attempt was carried out at the request of Soviet leaders, who were allegedly alarmed by the pope’s support for the Solidarity trade union in Poland and his outspoken opposition to communist regimes.

Three Bulgarians suspected of complicity in the shooting were acquitted by an Italian court because of a lack of evidence.

John Paul sought to lay the issue to rest in 2002, declaring during a visit to Bulgaria that he never believed there was a Bulgarian connection to Agca.

However, in his recently published book, “Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums,” the pope returned to the issue by saying Agca had been maneuvered by another party.

“Ali Agca, as everyone says, is a professional assassin. The shooting was not his initiative, someone else planned it, someone else commissioned him,” the pope wrote.