Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981, was released from a Turkish prison on January 18.

A report from CNN news recalled that the late pontiff survived a six-hour operation following the attack, and spent three weeks recovering in Rome’s Gemelli hospital. Four days after the shooting, John Paul announced from his hospital bed he had forgiven Agca and urged the faithful to pray for the attempted assassin.

The British Guardian newspaper reported that Agca served 19 years in an Italian prison for the attack on John Paul, before being granted clemency by the president of Italy at the pope's request in 2000. He was then extradited to Turkey to serve a sentence for other crimes, including the 1979 murder of Abdi Ipekci, a Turkish newspaper editor. In addition to that charge Agca was sentenced separately to seven years and four months for two robberies committed in Turkey in 1979. However, Turkish authorities gave him credit for the 19 years he served in an Italian prison and his sentence was further reduced by several amnesties and amendments of the Turkish penal code.

Agca’s lawyer distributed an irrational statement in his behalf outside the prison in Sincan, a suburb of Ankara, the Turkish capital, in which the unsuccessful assassin declared: "I proclaim the end of the world. All the world will be destroyed in this century. Every human being will die in this century ... I am the Christ eternal."

Agca was driven to a military hospital to receive the Turkish equivalent of a pre-induction physical and psychological evaluation under the nation’s compulsory military service laws, but a previous 2006 military hospital report declared him unfit for military service because of a "severe anti-social personality disorder."

A report in the British Times for January 18 noted that Agca said in the week before his release that he would “answer all questions” about the assassination attempt after leaving prison, raising hopes that he will finally shed light on reports that the assassination attempt was a KGB plot. The Times report noted:

The report quoted from a statement made to the Italian daily, La Stampa, on January 17 by Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, who was the Vatican’s Foreign Minister at the time of the attack. Cardinal Silvestrini related that John Paul had “become convinced that the origins of the plot lay in the Soviet bloc.”

The Vatican “had the impression that Agca was a pawn in a game much bigger than him, and did not know much, ” Silvestrini continued. “Even now I doubt if he will say anything concrete.”

William F. Jasper discussed Agca’s connections with the KGB in several article for The New American magazine’s print and online editions. In “Gorbachev to Receive Liberty Medal,” Jasper referenced a book published in Poland in 2008 entitled About the Pope: Spies in the Vatican, by John Koehler.  As part of his research, Koehler produced a Kremlin document signed by nine top Politburo members — including former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev.

Jasper notes: “It was a death sentence against Pope John Paul II,” continuing:

“The document adds to the already overwhelming evidence that would-be assassin Mehmet Ali Agca was an agent of Bulgaria’s secret police, who were merely acting on behalf of the Soviet KGB.”

In a follow-up article, “Gorbachev Still to Recieve Liberty Medal,” Jasper quoted more information from Koehler’s book, noting:

While some may take comfort in the fact that the old Soviet Union is gone, replaced by a more “pro-Western” Russia, the legacy of the KGB continues on. Since the supposed collapse of the Soviet Union, all of the key centers of power — political, economic, military, intelligence — in Russia and the other "former" Soviet states have remained in the hands of lifelong communists. Current President Dmitry Medvedev's mentor, Vladimir Putin, joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union when he was a law student at Leningrad State University. He joined the KGB while young and served the Soviet spy agency until 1991. In 1998 President Boris Yeltsin appointed Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB). In 1999, Yeltsin appointed Putin acting prime minister of the Government of the Russian Federation. Putin was elected president in 2000 and was reelected in 2004. Unable to serve for a third term, Putin was replaced by his hand-picked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, who subsequently appointed Putin prime minister of Russia.

With the KGB’s successors still on the job in Russia, it will be interesting to see how Mehmet Agca’s new “revelations” unfold. But if the Vatican’s assessment that “Agca was a pawn in a game much bigger than him” was correct, Agca had better watch his step, as well as his back. The communists have very efficient ways of silencing the pawns in their game, as President John Kennedy's apparent assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, would tell us, if he could speak from the grave.


 

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DDW said:

	Yes indeed folks Communism is alive and well and just as foul, loathsome and vile as ever.
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January 18, 2010
Votes: +2

naterod said:

... communisim was a creation of international bankers much like world-wide terrorism is a creation of the neo-cons anything to keep you extremely afarid and therefore easier to control. The easiest tactic to control the bewildered herd into accepting the policies that diminish social power and influence sepaeration with racism...the rabit hole goes so much deeper than the "scourge of racism" these sentiments are simpistic and irrational and a weapon of anti-semitic and racits who view the world in almost archaic terms without communism vietnam and korea and the atrocity of nicaragua would have been impossible with open public warfare do you actually believe you live in a democracy?

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January 20, 2010
Votes: +0

naterod said:

	... i meant the "scourge of communism"
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January 20, 2010
Votes: -1

DDW said:

	Democracy? I certainly hope not. We are a Constitutional Republic.
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January 20, 2010
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DDW said:

	We float on a vast and deep sea of ignorance We are a Constitutional Republic, NOT a democracy. A democracy is the LAST thing the Founding Fathers wanted. Start reading their writings. Read the Constitution. GET EDUCATED!!!!
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January 22, 2010
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nothen hamburg said:

	not anymore we have become an effective plutocracy. you have no freedoms and you have no voice or face you are simply a representation of data in mathematical equations.
	report abuse vote down vote up

January 25, 2010
Votes: +0