3 Bulgarians Cleared in Pope Shooting Trial

The alleged “Bulgarian connection” implicating the Bulgarian secret service and the Soviet KGB in the 1981 shooting of Pope John Paul II collapsed Saturday with the acquittal of most of the Bulgarian and Turkish defendants for lack of evidence.

All three Bulgarians and three of the Turks on trial in Rome were acquitted of conspiring with the would-be papal assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, 28, who is serving a life term in an Italian prison for shooting the Pope in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.

Following a 10-month trial in which Agca shattered his own credibility as the principal prosecution witness by proclaiming repeatedly that ‘I am Jesus Christ,’ the Turkish gunman received an additional sentence of one year on a charge of illegally smuggling into Italy the handgun that he used in the shooting.

A Rome jury of six men and women and two judges also found one of the three Turks acquitted in the conspiracy, Omer Bagci, guilty of helping smuggle the gun to Agca and sentenced him to three years and two months’ imprisonment. Bagci, 39, had confessed to his role in bringing the Browning automatic pistol into Italy and handing it over to Agca before the shooting, which took place as the pontiff passed among the crowd in St. Peter’s Square, riding in his then-unarmored papal vehicle following his regular weekly audience.

After Agca’s conviction and life sentence in 1981, both judges and prosecutors expressed serious doubts that he had acted alone in the shooting. Ironically, one of the jurists who was most outspoken in his belief that Agca was the point man of a wider conspiracy was Judge Severino Santiapichi, who was the chief judge in the lengthy trial that ended Saturday without convincingly proving the conspiracy.

‘I’m a Free Man Again’

Sergei Ivanov Antonov, 37, the only one of the three Bulgarians accused of complicity in the plot who was in Italy to face the trial, was freed after the verdict. Returning to the building in which he has been under house arrest, Antonov told the doorman, “I’m a free man again.” However, authorities blocked his departure from Italy pending a final decision from an appeals court in the case.

Antonov had been working in Rome as station manager of Balkan Air, the Bulgarian state airline, when he was arrested in November, 1983. He has been held either in prison or under house arrest since then.

The other two alleged Bulgarian conspirators, Todor Aivazov, 42, a financial officer in Bulgaria’s Rome embassy, and Lt. Col. Zhelyo Kolev Vassilev, 44, an assistant to the embassy military attache, were tried in absentia after claiming diplomatic immunity and refusing to return to Italy from Bulgaria for the trial.

Court Acquits Three

Of the four Turks in addition to Agca who were indicted in the alleged conspiracy, the court acquitted three: Musa Serdar Celebi, 34; a reputed leader of the extreme right-wing Turkish Gray Wolves; Oral Celik, 27, accused of being a second gunman and tried in absentia, and Bagci. The fourth, Bekir Celenk, although indicted, died in a Turkish prison where he was being held on another charge.

The so-called Bulgarian connection to the killing caused a sensation when Agca first began to elaborate on it during prison interviews with Italian investigating magistrate Ilario Martella in 1983. Agca told Martella that the Bulgarian secret service, at the behest of the Soviet KGB then headed by the late President Yuri V. Andropov, recruited him to kill the Pope as a counterblow against the Solidarity trade union movement in John Paul’s native Poland.

The Turkish gunman, who had escaped a Turkish prison after being found guilty in the murder of an Istanbul newspaper editor, said he was offered $1.2 million in German marks to be passed to him and fellow Turkish conspirators in Bulgaria by Celenk, whom he described as a Turkish underworld intermediary.

He alleged that Aivazov, Antonov and Vassilev planned the assassination attempt with him in a series of meetings in Sofia and Rome and that Antonov was at St. Peter’s with a getaway car on the fateful day.

The Turkish killer also claimed that a second gunman, his childhood friend Oral Celik, 27, also fired at the Pope but escaped after the shooting in a customs-sealed truck that left the Bulgarian Embassy an hour after the event and crossed into Bulgaria a day later. Celik was indicted in the Italian case and tried in absentia, but his whereabouts have never been traced.

Martella, the highly respected investigating magistrate who brought the case to trial, found Agca’s memory for seemingly intimate detail about the private lives of the three Bulgarians so convincing that he believed that the Turkish gunman had conspired closely with them. Their defense attorneys argued that Agca had been coached on the convincing details, such as Antonov’s at-home collection of miniature whiskey bottles, while he was in prison long after the shooting.

Agca’s credibility was not helped by frequent contradictions in his varying accounts of the alleged events or by his recanting of some of his testimony, including the account of a meeting in Rome with Antonov’s wife.

But his reliability as the key witness upon whose word virtually the entire prosecution case rested was shattered on the opening day of the trial when he announced dramatically that he was Jesus Christ.

In subsequent sessions, Agca repeated the claim, predicted the imminent end of the world and said that only John Paul could authenticate his divinity.

The outcome of the trial was not entirely unexpected. Two weeks ago, the prosecutor asked the court to acquit the three Bulgarian defendants, saying he was personally convinced of their guilt but had no alternative under Italian law but to formally request acquittal. At that time, the court refused.

The prosecutor had earlier asked for sentences ranging from life imprisonment to 24 years for the Turkish defendants.

The trial began May 27, 1985, and the court traveled to Bulgaria, Turkey, France, West Germany and the Netherlands, hearing 80 witnesses during 97 sessions. The jury began deliberations a week ago.