The man who tried to kill pope John Paul II warned his successor on Wednesday not to make a scheduled visit to Turkey because his life would be at risk.
”As someone who knows these matters well, I say your life is in danger,” Mehmet Ali Agca said. ”Don’t come to Turkey.”
Agca spoke from prison amid continuing fury in the Muslim world over Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks last week that were taken as critical of Islam. Agca, formerly a member of an extreme right-wing group in Turkey, tried to assassinate Pope John Paul in St Peter’s square in Rome in 1981 for reasons that have never been fully made clear.
The pope’s safety has become a key issue amid the uproar about his alleged denigration of Islam. But he did not abandon his routine on Wednesday, greeting the crowd at his weekly general audience from the back of an open jeep driven through the crowded St Peter’s square.
According to Italian media reports, plainclothes police dressed as tourists had been assigned to mix with the tens of thousands of people who flocked to the audience. Police marksmen were reported to have been deployed on roofs overlooking the square and there was speculation that the pope was wearing a flakjacket under his robes.
The prefect of Rome, Achille Serra, acknowledged that security had been reinforced. He said there was ”no specific threat”, but that it would be ”naive not to take the situation into account”. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister, Francesco Rutelli, said police throughout the country had stepped up surveillance of ”meeting places for Islamic communities”.
The pope expressed the hope on Wednesday that his words might ”constitute an impulse and encouragement towards positive, even self-critical, dialogue both among religions and between modern reason and Christian faith”.
He is due to visit Turkey in November on his first journey to a Muslim country since being elected pontiff. Catholic bishops met in Istanbul on Monday and decided the trip should go ahead despite the crisis. But there have been widespread and insistent demands in Turkey for the visit to be scrapped if the pope does not apologise for his remarks.
In Tunisia on Wednesday, Reuters reported that Tuesday’s edition of the French newspaper Le Figaro had been confiscated because its content insulted Islam and the prophet Muhammad. The daily ran an article by the philosopher Robert Redeker on the controversy about the pope’s remarks on Islam, in which Redeker described the Qur’an as a ”book of unprecedented violence” and accused Muslims of seeking to intimidate the West.
”The edition of September 19 of Le Figaro which contains offensive material about Islam has been confiscated,” the source told Reuters.
In New York, Iran’s hardline President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took an unexpectedly reconciliatory line towards the pope’s remarks, saying: ”There is no problem.” On Monday the Iranian spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomenei, had accused the pope of joining a US-led ”crusade” against Islam. – Guardian Unlimited Â