Mehmet Ali Agca

Mehmet Ali Ağca (born January 9, 1958 in Hekimhan , Malatya ) is a Turkish right-wing extremist . He murdered the Turkish journalist Abdi İpekçi on February 1, 1979, and committed an assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in Rome on May 13, 1981 .

Life

Activities in Turkey

Ağca was close to the Gray Wolves . In 1979 he murdered the journalist Abdi İpekçi (head of the Turkish newspaper Milliyet ). Before that he organized shootings and street fights against left- and Kemalist students in Ankara and Istanbul together with his companion Abdullah Çatlı . After İpekçi's murder, Ağca left Istanbul, escaped to Erzurum with Haluk Kırcı , a high-ranking member of the Gray Wolves, and hid there. But Ağca soon returned to Istanbul, where he was recognized by police officers and imprisoned despite a forged passport and wig. He received a prison sentence, but escaped from Maltepe Military Prison in Istanbul on November 24, 1979. According to witnesses, some soldiers who were close to the Gray Wolves (Bünyamin Yilmaz) gave him a weapon and helped him escape. However, this statement has been denied. At that time there was press censorship and limited freedom of expression; official investigations were not objective. While independent sources attempted to prove that it would have been impossible to escape from Maltepe Military Prison without the support of the military, this theory did not find official approval.

The popemobile on which John Paul was shot is now in a museum

Assassination attempt on the Pope

attack

Ağca carried out the assassination attempt on John Paul II in St. Peter's Square in Rome on May 13, 1981 with a pistol. Three bullets hit the Pope, one of which injured him badly. While two bullets smashed the left index finger and caused a graze on the right forearm, the third bullet destroyed several loops of the small intestine and finally emerged again just next to the spine. Ağca tried to escape after the shooting, but was caught by the papal bodyguard Camillo Cibin and was arrested.

motive

Over the years, Ağca has expressed contradictions about his motive. Ağca himself has not disclosed any information about the logistics of the attack to this day . 2006 was a committee of the Italian Parliament to the conclusion that the attack on the instructions of Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet secret service GRU was commissioned - in cooperation with the Bulgarian secret service and the Ministry of State Security of the GDR . In the memoirs published by Ağca in 2013, he stated that he had been personally commissioned by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini with the words "You must kill the Pope in the name of Allah".

Reaction of Pope John Paul II

Memorial stones to the assassination attempt in Vatican City

The Pope caused a stir when he forgave the assassin on his sick bed in the Gemelli Clinic and visited him in prison two years after his recovery. Since the assassination attempt fell on the 64th anniversary of the first apparition of Mary in Fátima , John Paul II attributed his salvation to Mary, the mother of Jesus , and later thanked her with a pilgrimage to Fátima. Ağca brought the assassination attempt at a court hearing in 1985 with Fátima and described himself as "Christ born again".

Pardon in Italy

After he was sentenced to imprisonment in July 1981 , on June 13, 2000 (after 19 years in prison), Italian President Ciampi gave him an amnesty at the request of the Pope, and Ağca was extradited to Turkey.

Extradition to Turkey

There he had been sentenced to death in absentia for the murder of İpekçi . This sentence was commuted to life imprisonment before extradition and later shortened so that he would have had 36 years imprisonment - including convictions for two other crimes in Turkey in the 1970s. Reduced sentences and an amnesty resulted in his parole release on January 12, 2006. However, the suspended sentence was lifted by the Turkish Supreme Court on January 20, 2006 and Ağca was arrested again.

Ağca was not drafted into the Turkish military service, which he had evaded in the 1970s. He was examined in a military prison in Istanbul and found unfit, whether for psychological or physical reasons, was unknown. In 2006, renewed examinations confirmed that he was unsuitable as a soldier due to an "advanced anti-social personality disorder".

Today, Ağca is committed to the gray wolves, but describes the 1970s as a "closed chapter" and is distant from the MHP (political arm of the gray wolves).

In May 2008, Ağca applied for Polish citizenship . After his release from prison he wants to settle in Poland , said his lawyer. According to his own statements to the media, he has now converted to Catholicism . In an interview with a Turkish newspaper in November 2010, however, Ağca stated that Christianity and Judaism are “definitely at an end” and that he accepts Mohammed as the last prophet.

On January 18, 2010, he was released from a maximum security prison in Sincan near Ankara.

On December 27, 2014, Ağca laid two bouquets of white roses at the tomb of John Paul II in St. Peter's Basilica . The Italian police then arrested him because he had entered Italy without a Schengen visa .

memoirs

After his release from Turkish custody, Mehmet Ali Ağca published his memoirs in Italian with the title Mi avevano promesso il paradiso (“They promised me paradise”). In it he claims to have received the murder order from Ayatollah Khomeini personally. The disappearance of the pupil Mirella Gregori in 1983 is closely linked to that of the youth Emanuela Orlandi in Rome and that of the Soviet journalist Oleg Bitow in Venice . A spokesman for the Vatican denies Ağca's representations. He explained that what was verifiable about the book turned out to be wrong.

Web links

 Wikinews: Mehmet Ali Ağca  - in the news

• Literature by and about Mehmet Ali Ağca in the bibliographic database WorldCat .
• Mehmet Ali Ağca in the Internet Movie Database .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Completely at the mercy of the doctors - The life-threatening injuries of John Paul II in Der Spiegel , accessed on December 20, 2009
2. ↑ See Stefan Samerski : Teufel und Weihwasser. The Pope and the Erosion of Communism , in: Osteuropa 59 (2009), pp. 183–193, here: p. 188.
3. ^ Andreas Khol: Austrian Yearbook for Politics 2000 . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-486-56590-7 , p. 657 ( limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed January 9, 2017]).
4. ↑ ^{a b} Pope assassin is free again in FAZ , accessed on January 18, 2010
5. ^ Pope assassin became a Catholic in Wiener Zeitung , accessed on December 20, 2009
6. ↑ Pope assassin again confesses to Islam in Vakit , accessed on November 28, 2010
7. ↑ Two bouquets of white roses. domradio.de, December 28, 2014, accessed December 28, 2014 . 
8. ↑ Mehmet Ali Agca : Mi avevano promesso il paradiso . Chiarelettere, Milan , 2013; see also: Pope assassin names Ayatollah Khomeini as the mastermind In: Die Zeit Online, February 1, 2013.
9. ↑ ('Zeit', ibid .; see also 'Tempi', February 1, 2013 “Il Vaticano smonta le rivelazioni di Ali Agca sull attentato di Givoanni Paolo II”).