Bullets on Saint Peter's Square

VATICAN CITY - On the afternoon of May 13, 1981, as Pope John Paul II was crossing Saint Peter`s Square in an open white convertible in front of a crowd of 20,000 of the faithful, a flurry of shots rang out and the head of the Catholic church collapsed.
Rushed to Rome`s Gemelli hospital, the pope underwent a five-and-a-half hour operation to remove a bullet from his abdomen. Two other bullets had hit his left hand and his right arm.
His assailant, a 23-year-old Turk named Mehmed Ali Agca, was arrested before he could leave the square and taken immediately for questioning.
John Paul survived, though the attack was to have serious consequences for his health in later years.
He was able to leave hospital on June 3 and resume work in the Vatican, though a persistent fever due to a viral infection contracted during the blood transfusions meant he had to return on June 14 for a further three weeks.
By common consent the pope`s robust constitution, strengthened by a lifetime`s sporting activity, helped to pull him through.
From his hospital bed, a few days after the attack, the pope issued a statement concerning his attacker: "I pray for the brother who struck me and have sincerely forgiven him."
The personality and motivation of Agca remain to this day something of a mystery.
He was put on trial in July 1981 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
He initially claimed to have acted on behalf of the Palestinians, then said he was part of a Bulgarian-backed conspiracy, instigated by the KGB, to eliminate the pope because of his support for Poland`s Solidarity movement. No conclusive evidence has emerged to back up these or any other theories.
Agca was a former member of the Turkey`s rightwing Grey Wolves movement, and had fled his homeland after being sentenced in his absence to a life sentence for murder. He had already announced an intention to kill the pope in 1979 during a papal visit there.
In December 1983 the pope visited him in his prison cell, but he has never revealed what his would-be assassin said to him. Agca remains in prison at Ancona, on the Adriatic coast, in conditions that have been considerable eased since 1996.
A further effect of the assassination attempt was to strengthen John Paul`s cult of the Virgin Mary, whom he credited with saving him.
The date of the attempt on his life was that of the Virgin`s first reported apparition at Fatima, in Portugal, in 1917, and the bullet from Agca`s gun is now mounted in the crown on the Virgin`s statue at Fatima, where the pope made a pilgrimage on the 10th anniversary of the attack.

04/02/2005 21:27 GMT