Would-be Papal Assassin Agca Released from Turkish Jail

The pope met and forgave Agca in 1983 while the gunman was serving a 19-year sentence in an Italian prison. Photo by flickr.com

The gunman who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca, has been released from jail in Turkey and promptly proclaimed that he is “the Christ eternal”.

Agca served 19 years in an Italian prison for shooting John Paul, and another 10 years in Turkey for the earlier murder of a Turkish newspaper editor. The pope met and forgave Agca in 1983 while the gunman was serving his sentence.

In a statement issued on his release, he said "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".

Turkish media say Agca is now to be taken to a military facility and then to a hospital.

Agca said in a letter given to reporters last Wednesday "I will answer to all of these questions in the next weeks."

In 1981, John Paul II was shot and critically wounded in St Peter's Square by Agca, an expert gunman. Soviet spies were blamed for allegedly ordering the assassination attempt.

Mehmet Ali Agca later admitted he had two Bulgarian accomplices in Rome at the time, including Zilo Vassilev, the Bulgarian military attache in Italy.

He claims to have received two months of training in weaponry and terrorist tactics in Syria as a member of the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine paid for by the Communist Bulgarian government, although this has been questioned.

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