Commission says Soviets behind attempt to kill John Paul

An Italian parliamentary commission has concluded that the Soviet Union was behind the 1981 attempt to kill Pope John Paul II, a theory long alleged, but never proved.

“This commission believes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leaders of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate Pope Karol Wojtyla,” said a draft of the commission’s report, a copy of which was made available today to The Associated Press. Wojtyla was John Paul’s Polish name.

The commission held that the Pope was a danger to the Soviet bloc because of his support for the Solidarity labour movement in his native country, the first free trade union in communist Eastern Europe.

The draft report also said a photograph showed that a Bulgarian man acquitted of involvement in the 1981 assassination attempt was in St. Peter’s Square when the Pontiff was shot.

The Bulgarian secret service was allegedly working for Soviet military intelligence, but the Italian court held the evidence was insufficient to convict the Bulgarians in the plot.

The pope was shot in St. Peter’s Square by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca on May 13, 1981. He changed his story often and investigators said it was never clear who he had been working for. He initially blamed the Soviets.

The Italian commission was originally established to investigate any KGB penetration of Italy during the Cold War. Commission president, Sen. Paolo Guzzanti, said he decided to investigate the 1981 shooting after John Paul said in his book Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums, about his attacker and the shooting: “someone else planned it, someone else commissioned it.” The book came out shortly before the pope’s death last year.

Sergei Antonov, former Rome station manager of Bulgaria’s state airline, claimed during his trial that he was in his office when John Paul was shot. Italy had accused him of complicity with Agca.

Antonov’s lawyer, Giuseppe Consolo, said it was a case of mistaken identity and the man in the photograph had come forward during the investigation as an American tourist of Hungarian origin. Consolo said the photo was thus never used as evidence in the trial.

The report must be approved by the full commission.