Turkey’s appeal court sent Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to kill pope John Paul II, back to prison until 2010 after his early release last week caused a wave of controversy, Turkish media reported on Monday citing prosecutors.
The court ruled that Agca still had four years to serve behind bars for the 1979 murder of a prominent Turkish journalist, two robberies and escaping from prison, the Anatolia news agency quoted prosecutors as saying.
Agca should be now released on January 18, 2010, the agency reported, adding that the decision had been sent to the Istanbul jail where he is imprisoned.
Agca was grranted an early release on January 12 this year after spending a quarter-century incarcerated in Italy and in Turkey, but was put back in jail last Friday when the Turkish court reviewed his case and determined parole had mistakenly been granted.
It found that reductions to his overall term from amnesty laws and penal code reforms had been miscalculated, and he was swiftly re-arrested after spending just eight days as a free man.
Agca’s lawyer, Mustafa Demirbag, told Haberturk television late on Sunday that “a day before he was released I asked him to make a choice: Did he want to live as an ordinary man or a star?
“He did not take much time to think before answering: ‘I want to be an ordinary person. Definitely. I want to live in seclusion in a village’.”
He said his client never thought about fleeing while the appeals court reviewed his early release, which sparked widespread public anger.
Agca had been about to speak to the media before being re-arrested, he said.
“If people are curious about the answers to certain questions, Agca should have been allowed to speak,” Demirbag said.
The lawyer denied that Agca was mentally ill, but admitted that a medical check-up at a military hospital last week found him to have “an advanced anti-social personality disorder”.
Agca, a former member of an ultra-nationalist militant group called the Grey Wolves, became notorious in Turkey in 1979 when he gunned down Abdi Ipekci, the chief editor and columnist of the liberal daily Milliyet.
He escaped from the jail while awaiting trial and resurfaced on St Peter’s Square, Rome, on May 13, 1981 having shot pope John Paul II, who was seriously wounded.
The motives for his attack on the pontiff, and who might have sponsored it, remain a mystery.
Agca has claimed his attack was part of a divine plan, but he has given contradictory statements, frequently changing his story and forcing investigators to open dozens of inquiries.
Italy pardoned Agca for the pope’s shooting in 2000 and extradited him to Turkey, where he was immediately jailed for two robberies he committed in the 1970s. – AFP