Ankara, Turkey – The man who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 will be released from a Turkish prison this week after a court decided he had completed his sentence with time served for the attack on the pontiff and crimes committed in his homeland.
Mehmet Ali Agca was extradited to Turkey in 2000 after serving almost 20 years in Italy for shooting and wounding the pope in St. Peter’s Square in Rome. His motive for shooting John Paul in the abdomen May 13, 1981, remains unclear.
Agca, 47, was to be released on parole Thursday, said his lawyer, Mustafa Demirbag, because “he had no disciplinary problems.”
Turkish paramilitary police were expected to take Agca first to a local military station and then to a military hospital in Istanbul for a medical check, a routine procedure.
Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the Vatican would defer to the judgment of the Turkish tribunal.
In one of the most famous moments of his papacy, John Paul forgave Agca 2 1/2 years after the attack, sitting face-to-face and almost touching knees with his attacker during a private meeting in a prison cell in Rome.
“The Lord gave us the grace to be able to meet each other as men and as brothers,” he said.
Reporters were barred, but a Vatican film showed that Agca bent and kissed the pope’s ring at the start of the meeting.
Upon his return to Turkey from Italy, Agca immediately was sent to prison to serve a 10- year sentence for murdering Turkish journalist Abdi Ipekci in 1979. He was separately sentenced to more than seven years for two robberies in Turkey.
An Istanbul court ruled in 2004 that Agca should serve only the longest sentence – his conviction for killing Ipekci.
In his book “Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums,” John Paul wrote that Agca was a pawn in his shooting: “Ali Agca, as everyone says, is a professional assassin. The shooting was not his initiative, someone else planned it, someone else commissioned him.”
