It was the early evening of May 13 1981 and Pope John Paul II was being driven across Saint Peter’s Square at the Vatican in his open white car, as he was every week for his general audience.
As usual, the huge plaza was thronged with pilgrims and onlookers, numbering around 20 000. It also contained at least one would-be assassin, a 23-year-old Turk called Mehmet Ali Agca.
When the pope suddenly collapsed, many in the crowd did not immediately realise what had happened, as the noise of the four shots from a Browning pistol had been drowned in the general hubbub.
Rushed to Rome’s Gemelli hospital, his ceremonial robe spattered in blood, the pope underwent a five-and-a-half hour operation to remove a bullet from his abdomen. Two other shots had hit his left hand and his right arm; two women in the crowd were also injured.
John Paul, who was five days short of his 61st birthday at the time of the attack, was nevertheless back at work less than a month later, though the bid on his life was to have serious consequences for his health in later years.
By common consent, the pope’s robust constitution, strengthened by a lifetime’s sporting activity, helped pull him through; his death in April last year was attributed to a series of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease.
Agca, who was overpowered seconds after the attack, was put on trial in July 1981 and sentenced to life imprisonment in Italy, but freed in June 2000 after being pardoned by Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.
On December 27, 1983, the pope visited Agca in his cell at Rome’s Rebibbia prison, and told him he had forgiven him for the attack.
Agca, who was later extradited to his native land to be tried and jailed for separate offences, never clearly explained why he tried to kill the pope, and the latter never said if Agca had told him the reason when he visited him in his cell.
However his motives appeared to be at least partly political, as Agca was a known member of a far-right nationalist group in Turkey, and had earlier made statements describing the pope as both a ”capitalist” and a ”crusader”, or anti-Islamic activist.
When Agca was overpowered in Saint Peter’s Square, investigators found a garbled note in his pocket saying: ”I killed the pope to protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and the United States and against the genocides they are perpetrating in El Salvador and Afghanistan.”
The United States was at the time involved in combating left-wing guerrillas in central America, while the Soviet army was fighting Islamic rebels in Afghanistan. – AFP
