Man who shot pope to get out of prison

ANKARA, Turkey – The gunman who wounded Pope John Paul II said Wednesday he would answer questions about the 1981 attack after he is released from prison next week.

Little is known about what led Mehmet Ali Agca to shoot at the pope while he was greeting the faithful in St. Peter’s Square, but that he has said that foreign powers had conspired to have the Polish-born pontiff killed.

“I will answer to all of these questions in the next weeks,” Agca said in a letter written in English and released by his lawyers.

Historians, law enforcement officials and John Paul’s followers have long sought answers about the attack, including whether it was a plot to assassinate the pope whose championing of Poland’s Solidarity labor movement figured in the demise of communism in the Soviet bloc.

When Agca was arrested minutes after the attack, he declared he had acted alone. Later, he suggested Bulgaria and the Soviet Union’s KGB were behind the attack, but then backed off that line. His contradictory statements, including claims to be a Messiah, have frustrated prosecutors over the decades and raised questions about his mental health.

The pope met and forgave Agca in 1983 while the gunman was serving a 19-year sentence in an Italian prison. John Paul died in 2005.

On Monday, Agca ends another 10-year prison sentence for killing a Turkish journalist in 1979.

Italian magistrate Rosario Priore has said he was convinced there was a plot against the pope and that Agca did not act alone, but he failed to convince a jury in Rome in 1986 that Bulgaria and the Soviet KGB were involved.

Two years before Agca’s 1981 attack on the pope, he had escaped from a Turkish military prison while serving time for the murder of Turkish journalist Abdi Ipekci.