Pope Benedict XVI Blog

Prison transfer for would-be papal assassin

Istanbul, Aug. 17, 2007 (CWNews.com) - Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish man who shot Pope John Paul II (bio - news) on May 13, 1981, is being moved to a new high-security prison in Turkey.

Agca will be moved from one prison in Ankara to another institution in Istanbul. He had requested the transfer in order to be closer to relatives.

Agca was sentenced to life imprisonment by an Italian court for the attempted assassination of the Pope. But he was pardoned in 2000 by Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, who was acting with the tacit support of Pope John Paul after the Pontiff had encouraged gestures of pardon for prisoners as part of the celebration of the Jubilee Year. Upon his release from Italian prison, the Turkish gunman was handed over to authorities in his own country, to resume serving a 10-year prison term for an earlier murder conviction there. Agca had escaped from jail in Turkey in 1979 after serving less than 6 months of that term.

Earlier this month an acquaintance of the Turkish gunman said that Agca had promised to write a tell-all book about his effort to assassinate the Pope. The prospect for such a book-- tentatively entitled The Agca Code in an obvious imitation of the best-selling Da Vinci Code-- did not generate great excitement among European publishers. In the years since the attempted assassination, Agca has issued a number of different explanations for the crime, often contradicting himself and putting forward a variety of conspiracy theories.

posted by Dr. Denice Hanley, DPM, M.Div. @ 4:21 PM