Soviet Union blamed for pope’s shooting Soviets blamed in John Paul’s shooting

ROME – An Italian parliamentary commission has concluded “beyond any reasonable doubt” that the Soviet Union was behind the 1981 shooting of Pope John Paul II, the first time an official body has blamed the Kremlin for the assassination attempt.

The draft report, obtained by the Associated Press on Thursday, said the pope was considered a threat to the Soviet bloc because of his support for the Solidarity labor movement in his native Poland. Solidarity was the first free trade union in communist Eastern Europe.

The Italian report said Soviet military intelligence – and not the KGB – was responsible. Russian Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Boris Labusov called the accusation “absurd.”

“All assertions of any kind of participation in the attempt on the pope’s life by Soviet special services, including foreign intelligence, are completely absurd,” he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

In its report, the commission said Moscow was alarmed because “Poland was the main military base of the Warsaw Pact, its main supply lines and troop concentrations were there.”

“This commission believes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leaders of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate the pope Karol Wojtyla,” the document said. Wojtyla was John Paul’s Polish name.

The draft has no bearing on any judicial investigations, which have long been closed. If the commission approves the report in its final form at a meeting Tuesday, it will be the first time an official body has blamed the Soviet Union.

The report also said a photograph shows that Sergei Antonov, a Bulgarian man acquitted of involvement in the May 13, 1981 assassination attempt, was in St. Peter’s Square when the pontiff was shot by Mehmet Ali Agca.

The Bulgarian secret service was allegedly working for Soviet military intelligence, but the Italian court held the evidence was insufficient to convict the Bulgarians in the plot.

Agca, a Turk, has changed his story often and investigators said it was never clear who he was working for. He initially blamed the Soviets. In 1991, then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev denied there was KGB complicity.

The commission president, Sen. Paolo Guzzanti, said he decided to investigate the 1981 shooting after John Paul said in a 2005 book that “someone else planned it, someone else commissioned it.” The book came out weeks before the pope’s death.