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AGCA-RELEASE (UPDATED) Jan-12-2006 (990 words) With photos. xxxi
Pope John Paul II's would-be assassin freed from Turkish prison
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Turkish terrorist who shot and seriously wounded Pope John Paul II in a failed 1981 assassination attempt was freed on parole from a Turkish prison Jan. 12.
Mehmet Ali Agca was immediately handcuffed and taken to a military recruitment center to register for military service, obligatory for all Turkish men. He also underwent a medical exam to see if he was fit for service. Agca fled the military draft in the 1970s.
Since his extradition from Italy to Turkey in 2000, Agca served five years of a 10-year sentence for the 1979 murder of a Turkish journalist and two robberies the same year. But a Turkish court said Agca had completed his prison term and could be released, according to reports by the country's semiofficial Anatolia news agency.
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls, commenting on "the news of the possible freedom of Ali Agca" in a Jan. 8 press release, said the decision to release Agca should be up to the Turkish courts.
Concerning issues of "a judicial nature," the Vatican "submits to the decisions of the tribunals involved in this matter," the statement said.
Pope Benedict XVI is expected to travel to Turkey this fall.
Agca, 48, had served 19 years in an Italian prison for his May 13, 1981, assassination attempt on Pope John Paul in St. Peter's Square.
Just days after the near-fatal shooting, the Polish pope publicly forgave Agca, and in 1983 the pope embraced his would-be assassin in his Rome prison cell.
Though he was sentenced to life in prison for the shooting, Italian authorities granted Agca clemency in 2000 and returned him to Turkey. At the time, the Vatican said the pope personally intervened in the gunman's release from the Italian prison.
After returning to his home country, Agca was sent to prison for the murder of the editor of a liberal Turkish newspaper and two robberies committed in 1979.
New Turkish laws reduced Agca's original punishment from life in prison, or 36 years under Turkish regulation, to a 10-year sentence. Additional penal code reforms led a Turkish court recently to further deduct the years Agca served in Italian prison, thereby completing his sentence, according to The Associated Press.
Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, said his council did not want to interfere with the Turkish court's decision that determined Agca had "paid his debt to justice."
The cardinal said, however, that Scripture readings during this Christmas season have talked about Christ being sent "to proclaim liberty to captives."
Christ, in his mercy, will not break "a bruised reed" nor snuff out "a smoldering wick," he wrote in a statement sent to journalists Jan. 9.
Cardinal Martino also noted that "John Paul II, who immediately pardoned his attacker, titled one of his messages for the World Day of Peace: 'There Is No Peace Without Justice, No Justice Without Forgiveness.'"
Pope John Paul's former secretary, Polish Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz of Krakow, said the late pope "would have celebrated" upon hearing the news of Agca's scheduled release from prison.
"The Holy Father had forgiven him from the very first moment, sincerely so, and then when he met him in jail he spoke to him like a brother," he told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera Jan. 9.
Archbishop Dziwisz said the pope had once asked, "How could we show ourselves before the Lord if we didn't forgive each other?"
After being informed of his imminent release, Agca signed a short letter addressed to the Vatican expressing his and his family's gratitude for its support, according to La Repubblica newspaper.
"For the past 25 years, the Holy See has always been close to us, has supported us, and has shown itself to be very open. For this I very much thank the Vatican," the letter was quoted as saying.
How the Vatican dealt with Agca and his family shows religion to be "a sign of brotherhood and dialogue," he wrote.
"My infinite thanks," he said, and "on the occasion of my release (and) on behalf of the whole Agca family, I send my respectful greetings to the new pope," Pope Benedict.
At various times since the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul, Agca told different versions of what happened and who was behind it. At one point Agca claimed Bulgarian secret service agents hired him at the bidding of the Soviet KGB, the former Russian secret police and intelligence agency. The allegations resulted in a trial and acquittals in 1986 for the Bulgarian and Turkish defendants implicated by Agca.
Agca later said the Bulgarian connection was a fabrication of Italian intelligence officials who had promised him early release if he went along with their plan.
In recent years, Agca has said he acted on his own in shooting the pope. Agca, a Muslim, had publicly threatened to kill the pontiff in 1979 when the pope visited Turkey; in a letter to several Turkish newspapers, he called the pope a "crusader commander" sent by Western imperialists.
The late pope had offered his own views of the assassination attempt in his book, "Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums."
He expressed his belief that Agca was a professional assassin and that the assassination attempt was "not his initiative." The pope did not say who he thought was behind the shooting, but described it as an episode in the "last convulsions of 20th-century ideologies of force."
Pope John Paul long credited Mary with saving his life; he was shot May 13, the anniversary of the first of the apparitions in Fatima, Portugal. In 1984, he had the bullet fragment that was removed from his body placed in the crown of the Marian statue at the Fatima shrine.
END
Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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