Mystery behind historical assassinations
What you need to know:
- Mehmet Ali Agca, who had killed a well-known Turkish journalist before becoming infamous in St Peter’s Square, is now free from prison. He is granting interviews.
Where does the sun rise?
That was the answer veteran reporter Marvin Kalb received when he asked a senior Vatican cardinal about the motive behind the shooting of Pope John Paul II in 1981.
The cardinal refused to go further, despite Kalb’s continued questioning: Does that mean the Soviet Union was behind it? Does it mean there was money from Turkey?
What about Bulgaria? “I did not say that,” the cardinal told Kalb.
The cardinal’s answer sent Kalb, on a trip through Turkey, Eastern Europe and beyond in the 1980s. Needless to say, the mystery surrounding the pope’s shooting remains today. Beyond the name of the assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, there are very few known realities.
More irony: Agca, who had killed a well-known Turkish journalist before becoming infamous in St Peter’s Square, is now free from prison. He is granting interviews.
The mystery continues. At various times, Agca has said that the Vatican was behind the plot. On other occasions, he’s pointed to associates in Turkey and Bulgaria. Recently, he blamed Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini.
What is known is that Agca was sentenced to Turkey’s toughest prison after killing Abdi Ýpekçi, editor of the Turkish newspaper, Milliyet, in 1979. Six months later, he walked out of the prison—thought to be inescapable—wearing a guard’s clothes.
Chapter 2: Agca later appears in Bulgaria, living a life described as luxurious, said Kalb.
Chapter 3: Agca comes to Rome and stalks the pope. He shoots bullets into John Paul’s abdomen and arms, but is stopped by bystanders.
Chapter 4: Saying the pope is synonymous with capitalism, Agca defends his actions. But the pope visits him in prison and forgives him.
Chapter 5: Twenty years later, Agca is released in Italy and then enters prison in Turkey, where he has been sentenced to death.
Due to a variety of oddities, his sentence is commuted to life in prison, and he is released due to good behaviour in 2010. He proclaims himself to be Jesus Christ.
Kalb, who is 83, says the Agca case is the most perplexing and troubling mystery of his long journalism career.
That career includes the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, the landing of a man on the moon, and the elections of Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama.
This has made me think more deeply about the mysterious deaths of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 2004, the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the shooting of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
We know that Arafat was an enemy of Israel. Kennedy had a major showdown with the Soviet Union in 1962.
Lincoln was deeply involved in a civil war. Pope John Paul II had made the defeat of communism a central part of his papacy.
But those details do not convict. When will the sun rise on the facts?
