Pan terrorist

The would-be killer of the Pope reminded of himself and Gorbachev

Turkish extremist Mehmet Ali Agca (pictured) , who committedan attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II (of Polish origin) almost 27 years ago, will apply for Polish citizenship. The application has already been submitted to the Polish consulate in Ankara through lawyer Agca, who is currently serving a sentence in a Turkish prison.

The procedure for granting Polish citizenship requires the candidate to fulfill several conditions, one of which is a five-year stay in the country. But the final decision is made by the president, and he can make an exception. This just happened with the application of a Brazilian football player from the Warsaw club Legia. He became a Pole and was immediately included in the national team.

The case of Mehmet Ali Agca is special. On May 13, 1981, in St. Peter's Square in the Vatican, a militant of the Turkish terrorist organization "Grey Wolves" seriously wounded John Paul II in the stomach with pistol shots. The terrorist was immediately captured and sentenced to life imprisonment. Two years later, the recovered Pope met him face to face in his prison cell and forgave him. In 2000, at the request of the same Pope, after serving a 19-year sentence, Ali Agca was released from an Italian prison and handed over to Turkey. But in his homeland, the would-be pontiff’s killer was again behind bars - for the 1979 murder of the editor-in-chief of the Milliyet newspaper, Abdi Ipekci. Agca, 50, is due to be released in 2010. Along with the desire to become a Pole, he had another desire: to spend the last two years of his sentence in one of the prisons in Poland. There is no reaction from the Polish authorities yet, except for the eloquent remark of Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski. He called this desire of Ali Agca “the height of impudence.”

The name of the terrorist, who became famous for such a high-profile assassination attempt, appears every now and then on the pages of the Polish press. Indeed, immediately after his arrest, the Turkish extremist announced that he had been hired by the communist secret services of Eastern Europe. And although Agca himself later renounced these words, in Poland they are still another reason to speculate about the long “hand of Moscow.” The other day, the popular weekly magazine “Vprost” posted on its website a message about the sensational discovery of documents according to which some people place the blame for the assassination attempt on John Paul II... on Mikhail Gorbachev. We are talking about the directive of the CPSU Central Committee, which in the fall of 1979 instructed the security services to take steps to block the “Eastern offensive of the Vatican” after the election of a Pole as Pope. Behind the words “other means,” which should have been used in addition to discrediting, idle Polish analysts saw a hidden call for the physical liquidation of the Pope.

True, the sensation presented by the weekly turned out to be not the first freshness. Back in 1993, Russian authorities declassified the directive, and its full text was published in the historical journal Istochnik. Mikhail Gorbachev was Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee in 1979 and personally signed that document. But later he explained more than once that “other means” meant political action, and not murder. And “Vprost” itself already discussed this topic almost ten years ago. But now a surge of interest in the figure of Ali Agca has given rise to some politicians from President Lech Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party, which is in opposition, to once again raise the issue of punishing the former leader of the USSR.

Valery MASTEROV, Warsaw