Original subtitles

I wanted to leave a mark on history and then leave.

What I had in mind was to shoot the Queen of England.

There was Reagan, but Reagan had already been shot.

So the only one left was the pope.

Do not be afraid.

Do not be afraid.

Open your hearts. Open up your hearts to Christ.

St. Peter's Square in Vatican City

is where he has shown himself regularly to countless thousands of the faithful.

Here and on his many trips abroad, he has scorned security measures,

thrusting himself within touching distance of the people he loves.

My intention was to kill the pope and commit suicide.

This was my precise plan.

I remember everything.

I remember May 13.

When I woke up,

I went to Piazza Repubblica.

Indeed, it was a summer day.

There were tens of thousands of people.

I was like a tourist.

I went near the obelisk

and was approached by a plainclothes policeman.

He looked at me for several minutes.

I looked at him.

Then he went away.

I heard this clamor,

"Long live the pope!"

A force, something inexplicable pulled me forward.

There were so many people shouting,

"Long live the pope!"

And so, as the pope's first round passed,

it was impossible to do anything because there was a child in the way.

It would have been terrible to shoot her.

Then he went around the second time,

and what had already been written indeed happened.

I probably would have shot more...

but the incredible thing is that the gun jammed.

After two shots, it jammed.

I can remember how the pigeons

flew up in alarm,

and one could see the pope was losing his strength.

We realized that he was injured, and he slumped to one side.

I supported him and asked if he was in pain.

He said yes, and pointed to the place.

The bullet went through his whole body.

It fell to the ground in front of me, between me and him.

After the gun jammed,

I dropped it and someone caught me.

A strong hand.

I learned that it was a nun, Lúcia.

Basically, the world stopped spinning.

AGOSTINO GEMELLI POLYCLINIC

QUEEN MARGARET HOSPITAL

Pope John Paul is making steady progress,

but he's not yet out of danger.

The postoperative recovery

of John Paul II has happily ended.

His organs and systems function normally.

I am a journalist of Bulgarian origin.

I have been on this case for ten years.

I was interested in the attack against John Paul II

immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The new democratically-elected government in Bulgaria had decided,

at the request of the United States, to open a new investigation into

the attempted assassination of John Paul II.

Very quickly, after his arrest on St. Peter's Square,

Ali Ağca is presented to the judges. A very quick investigation takes place.

He says he acted alone.

A fairly speedy trial is organized,

in which he is sentenced to life imprisonment.

Mehmet Ali Ağca is found

guilty of the alleged crimes

and convicted to life imprisonment.

The attack on John Paul II,

there is a whiff of conspiracy,

a whiff of espionage around all of this,

which, indeed, has fascinated many people.

But if there are so many conspiracies,

it is also because there are many secret services

that got involved in this case,

which is the most emblematic case of the Cold War era.

A lone wolf is perfect

because he cannot be associated with an organization like the Grey Wolves,

which is fascist, criminal, and mafia-related.

The Grey Wolves that were, let's say

nationalists, they wanted to restore

an international Pan-Turkist unity.

The leader of this party,

Alparslan Türkeş, who is also called the Başbuğ, the Führer,

had collaborated with the Gestapo in the time of the Second World War.

This made the Grey Wolves a kind of

alchemy between Turkish nationalism,

extreme right-wing ideas, fascist and Nazi ideas,

with the conviction that it was necessary to defend a pure Turkish race

and to get rid of all those who were Kurds,

Armenians, or Christians, since they have another religion.

In Turkey, there was a possibility of a communist revolution.

It was necessary to stop them,

using good or bad means, with assassinations, murders.

In this way, the Grey Wolves were exploited for these misdeeds.

Essentially, they were employed by the CIA

in the war on communism.

The Grey Wolves were those who had been used

in the "stay-behind" network in Turkey.

The "stay-behind" was set up at the end of the Second World War

on the initiative of the United States and the Pentagon,

under the auspices of NATO.

It was a matter of creating

a whole network of ultra-secret sleeper cells

from violent right-wing extremist groups

all over the NATO member countries,

recruiting young people while training them,

and they could be used

in case the Soviet Union tried to invade Europe again.

These young Turks, until the title was made illegal,

called themselves the "Grey Wolves."

And there's a link, albeit indirect,

between Türkeş and the man who tried to kill the pope.

I have always been, let's say,

on the side of the working class,

because I come from a family of peasants, laborers.

In the neighborhood, where he plays and goes to school,

he meets, as a child, his friend, Oral Çelik,

with whom he will remain friends throughout his life.

Together they will also discover the ideology of the Grey Wolves.

Ali Ağca will soon make a name by completing a hit

ordered by the Grey Wolves, killing the chief editor

of the liberal newspaper Milliyet, Abdi İpekçi.

It was after that time that his real career as a terrorist began.

I ended up in the Kharkiv military prison.

It was virtually impossible to escape from there

without help from the inside.

Someone did it for the love of the Grey Wolves.

I had a gun with me when I escaped.

I was determined.

If something happened, I had 14 bullets.

I would have killed anyone in my way and then myself.

He simply walked out of prison disguised as a prison guard.

His friends, the Grey Wolves and those helping the Grey Wolves,

gave him what he needed.

He passed through four doors, four checkpoints.

His lifelong friend, Oral Çelik, was outside waiting in a car.

He gets in and leaves.

I was the one who got Ağca out of prison, and then we fled.

That's when we wrote that threatening letter to John Paul II.

The Milliyet newspaper publishes

Ali Ağca's letter,

which clearly says,

"I escaped from prison to kill the leader of the Crusaders,

Pope John Paul II, who is coming to Turkey,

who comes to tread the soil of Turkey."

"The pope must not come. Otherwise, I will kill him."

"The only reason I escaped is to attempt to assassinate the pope."

The idea of attacking John Paul II

was, of course, linked to the ideology of the Grey Wolves.

They were convinced that Christians should be eliminated.

And since he was the leader of Christians,

the pope, it was not surprising

that they decided to attack John Paul II.

When I escaped, I went to Ankara,

then I went to Erzurum,

and finally to Iran.

I traversed the mountains to Iran with an alcohol smuggler.

Very quickly, Ağca returned to Turkey.

From there, they will seek to find him new passports, a new identity,

and to organize his trip, this time to Europe.

And Ağca first passed through Bulgaria.

Bulgaria is a transit destination,

a crossing to get to Europe.

After a while,

I found a Turkish passport, the same passport

that I used on the day of the assassination attempt on the pope.

At the time, Sofia was a haunt for all kinds of traffickers

of weapons, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes.

Ali Ağca knocks on the door of room 911

in a luxury hotel in Sofia.

It is in this hotel that he socializes with many other Turks

who are, more or less,

implicated in the affair of the attack on John Paul II.

They gave him money.

Ah, the Vitosha Hotel. That's where I met Omar Mersan.

He's a fixer, a smuggler, a friend of mine.

Everything else is fiction,

a novel, let's say.

And he will go to Germany several times. And to Austria.

There were many Grey Wolves members who were based in Vienna.

The commando started to look for weapons.

It is obvious that, by recommendation of certain secret services,

they are directed to an arms dealer.

We bought the gun in Vienna.

We actually bought two guns,

for €2,000 or €3,000, I don't remember.

Then it turned out that he was a Nazi.

The gun dealer was a Nazi.

It was a coincidence, probably.

They buy four guns.

And not just any guns. They are 9mm Brownings.

They are extremely powerful weapons that can kill for sure.

Ali Ağca takes two.

So we returned to Rome.

We carried out the attack on the pope.

The secret service of the Soviet Union,

the KGB, must surely have been involved in the attempt to assassinate the pope.

There was a fear that John Paul II

might contribute to the dissolution of the Soviet empire, of the Soviet Union.

Several years before John Paul II's election, the KGB had already anticipated

the election of Karol Wojtyła as pope.

We have a pope.

Cardinal Wojtyła.

John Paul II was the first foreign pope to follow

a traditional series of Italian popes that lasted many centuries.

And this foreign pope hailed from Eastern Europe,

then under the communist regime.

The Soviet Union wanted to keep Poland under its influence,

to keep it in check.

But John Paul II gave courage to the Poles who, in some way,

had a revolutionary attitude against the regime.

They rebelled, and we know about the massive demonstrations

organized by Solidarity, the Polish syndicate.

A nationwide strike, led by Lech Wałęsa,

shook Poland to its communist foundations.

Wałęsa and his followers won a revolutionary concession.

For the first time in a Marxist state, the government accepted

the right of workers to organize independent unions.

And when John Paul II is elected, the KGB instantly runs for cover.

There are plans and talk of measures

to counter this violent anti-communist,

namely John Paul II.

There were plans to infiltrate the Vatican,

capillary infiltration of the chief rooms inside the Vatican,

by men affiliated with the KGB.

Obviously, as pope, being a great center of power

and having the ability to influence almost the whole world

inevitably makes you the center of interest

of all the secret services in the world.

Those years following the attack

were very difficult in international politics.

The Vatican, at that time, was a den of spies.

Spies from all over the world.

There were KGB spies.

There were infiltrators from the Polish and the Czechoslovak intelligence,

the German Stasi.

There were men from the CIA.

In the Vatican, the most active secret services

were certainly those from the East, from Eastern Europe.

My name is Tomasz Turowski.

I'm a retired colonel

from the Polish secret services.

I was 20 years old.

I was a student.

The colonel received me and said,

"If you want to work for the Polish intelligence services,

I support you."

"You have 24 hours to decide."

"And forget this meeting."

Twenty-four hours later, I said yes.

I was number 10682. I had already received orders.

"We have decided that you will enter

the Jesuit religious order."

"You will pursue a Jesuit career

to access strategic information about NATO."

They said, "Listen."

"The spiritual fathers and confessors from all the special services

that are responsible for the security of NATO bases in Italy

are, in fact, largely Jesuit priests."

"And you have to get all the way there."

"From there you can draw information

which cannot be obtained by other means."

It must be said that he had known John Paul II even before arriving in Rome,

when he was the archbishop of Krakow.

Hence, there were ties between the families,

between his family and John Paul II.

Therefore, as a mole, he managed to arrive at the Vatican, in Rome,

with a recommendation from Karol Wojtyła, the cardinal of Krakow.

But when, in 1978, John Paul II was elected pope,

his mission changed dramatically.

Because the orders received from that moment

were directed at knowing everything about John Paul II,

whose physical elimination, as we know, had definitely been planned by the KGB

should John Paul II interfere with their plans.

Turowski is there to understand what John Paul II does,

how he moves, where he goes, what he thinks.

But Turowski says he is there to protect him

and ensure that security becomes stronger so as to avoid an attack on him.

When Wojtyła became eligible for papacy,

my headquarters told me almost immediately,

"You have to do everything to ensure the safety of the pope."

Before the attack,

I was looking at a report from the Vatican surveillance service.

There were things unheard of.

During the Wednesday audiences,

they were alongside the car, the popemobile,

but there was nobody inside the popemobile, which is essential.

Their duty in case of a crisis, is to cover, with their own bodies,

the object they have to defend.

The pope asked me, "Tomasz, what is your real mission?"

I replied that my mission is to serve the country

and look after the safety of the Holy Father.

In fact, according to Tomasz Turowski's version,

it was important for the Soviet bloc

to make sure that if anything happened to the pope,

the blame would not fall on them.

Two months after the beginning of his sentence,

Ali Ağca asks to make new revelations.

I have spent many years working on this case.

Despite all the disappointments,

I never lost my enthusiasm.

I would still continue today.

Right from the start, Ali Ağca has only play-acted,

almost continuously.

He thought he was leading us by the hand

and led us to a certain place and then pushed us away.

At the time, this Bulgarian lead quickly emerged,

and it had its origin in the statements made by Ali Ağca himself.

Respond to the affirmation...

I confirm everything I said.

The assassination of the pope was desired by

the Bulgarian secret service, and we, the Turks,

acted at the instigation of the Bulgarian secret service.

Ali Ağca is someone

who has an animal instinct

for finding a way to get out of situations

and to work out how to negotiate,

to say what one wants to hear

in order to get what he wants in return.

He's very determined.

Ali Ağca receives a visit from the secret service,

but also from a businessman accompanied by an American.

Ağca himself says he doesn't know who it was.

But they very clearly make him understand that they will give him

the elements necessary to incriminate the Bulgarians.

Concerning this Bulgarian lead,

we know it was a project which the CIA was involved in.

I believe that even the Pentagon and the White House were involved,

because President Reagan had allegedly required the CIA bosses

to find evidence that the Kremlin had ordered the attack on the pope.

We were at the height of the Cold War.

Ronald Reagan had just taken office.

It was an opportunity to strengthen the confrontation

between the two blocs and the doctrine which,

when the case of the Bulgarian connection bursts,

becomes the number one concern of the United States,

who, based on this, declare war on the evil empire.

In fact, the attack on John Paul II

fueled the doctrine of the evil empire,

which guided the strategy and relations between the two blocs

throughout the decade of the 1980s.

I would rather see my little girls die now,

still believing in God,

than have them grow up under communism

and one day die no longer believing in God.

The CIA got a new director, William Casey, who was an extreme right-wing ideologue,

and he wanted a special assessment

on the fact the Soviets were involved in the plot to kill the pope.

There are also articles

that appear in the press, by Claire Sterling,

who was close to Casey, the boss of the CIA at that time.

He was fascinated by her writings on terrorism,

so she signs an article designating the KGB and the Bulgarian network.

The fact is the Bulgarian secret service could not have acted alone.

We have the testimony of a former director of the Bulgarian secret service.

But the Bulgarian services are the favorites of the KGB

for operations of this kind because they are so loyal and reliable

and that they are staffed at every level with Soviet functionaries.

One thing the Operations Directorate was trying to do on that operational level

was to embarrass the Soviets by making accusations

of their involvement with the papal plot.

This was a classic case of blowback.

The CIA put this information in the European press,

Claire Sterling read the European press,

she put it in her book and newspaper articles.

It came back to the United States, which is one of the real risks

of having a secret intelligence agency in a democracy.

It's not supposed to work that way.

There was talk of a Bulgarian lead

because Bulgarian citizens were involved and also ended up on trial.

There is one man in particular, Sergei Antonov.

This Bulgarian was even arrested and brought to trial.

First to appear in one of the special cages was Sergei Antonov,

one of three Bulgarians indicted, but the only one in the dock.

The other two are back home.

Two Turkish co-conspirators,

Musa Celebi and Ömer Bagci, are also on trial.

The problem with the case against the Bulgarians

is it depends entirely on the word of Ali Ağca.

He's changed his story several times already,

and as this extraordinary trial begins,

no one knows what he's going to say this time.

On the day of the attack of the pope,

Antonov was in St. Peter's Square with Ali Ağca.

This photograph. Is this person Antonov or not?

I think that it is possible.

I don't rule it out.

So why did you tell us it was Antonov?

There is only one truth.

There is only one truth.

I am innocent. I have nothing in common

with all these stories of which I am accused.

I have never seen, I do not know,

I have never met the person who accuses me.

At some point, the investigation revealed

that the photos taken were not of Antonov.

They said this was a secret service man.

Then someone revealed that he was

a tourist or a pilgrim, a Hungarian.

So it's a total fiasco.

The Bulgarian connection collapses entirely during the trial.

Curiously, the trial ends

with an odd court decision,

meaning that Antonov and the other two defendants

are acquitted due to a lack of evidence.

The hypothesis that the Bulgarian secret service,

and by implication the Soviet KGB,

could have been behind the assassination attempt

became weaker and weaker during the course of our investigations.

After two and a half years of investigation, the judges realized

that he had lied no less than 103 times.

There is a photo dated May 10, 1981, that portrays

Ali Ağca at a parish in Rome, during a mass conducted by John Paul II.

It is three days

before the attempted murder of John Paul II.

And there is Ali Ağca, a few steps from the pope.

In order to find out whether Ağca was present

at one of the Vatican ceremonies,

we went to great lengths to make inquiries.

We went through all the photos that our police has taken,

to see whether Ağca appeared at any of the many functions held in the Vatican.

And we found something.

We recognized Ağca in one photo close to the San Tommaso d'Aquino church,

on the outskirts of Rome when the pope is visiting.

I also asked the pope's photographer,

who took that photo,

to double-check it and tell me who he sees in that photo.

And he has no doubts. That man is Ali Ağca.

But why was he there? Who let him in?

It's absolutely impossible, because I disembarked at Termini station.

I arrived at nine or ten in the morning on Sunday,

with a suitcase in my hand.

I went to the Isa boarding house around noon,

so there was no time to go to the parish of St. Thomas.

That photo? You can see that's not me.

The so-called Vatican lead,

according to which senior officials in the Vatican hierarchy

wanted the elimination of John Paul II.

I believe that John Paul II had also made some enemies within the Vatican

because he had decided to support, also on an underground level, Solidarity.

Why was there talk of a Vatican lead?

Perhaps because it was known there were issues on the Eastern policy,

on how to relate to the Soviet Union.

There were multiple enemies.

My belief is that it is related to

the Vatican Bank crash, to the billions that disappeared.

There is a very, very big financial scandal linked to the Vatican Bank.

We realized that it was actually used for money laundering and wiring.

It is believed that the mafia also used it to launder a lot of money.

And finally, we wondered, regarding the money of the Vatican,

who manages it and how?

And it bothered a lot of people

that John Paul II decided to throw the cat among the pigeons.

He had to do it because this scandal of the Vatican Bank,

the authorities were looking into it.

It was becoming an international scandal, and he had to do something.

Finding people crazy enough

to want to kill the pope is tied to the Vatican money.

The Vatican say they were never involved

in dealings with the Ambrosiano Bank,

that they are only paying out £170 million in good faith.

One banker in Rome this morning described that as expensive innocence.

If the mafia was behind it,

then one billion or 1.5 billion

disappeared from the account of Banco Ambrosiano during the bankruptcy.

I believe that John Paul II was not aware

of Banco Ambrosiano's involvement, the mafia, and the laundered money

which was then also sent to Poland.

The secret deal was hammered out

behind the closed doors of the Vatican Bank.

It was a gentlemen's agreement, nothing on paper, no treaties,

just a transfer of money in return for certain guarantees.

It was a kind of tax haven.

The Vatican was used for tax evasion, but also to launder money,

whether by the mafia or others.

And it was very practical.

So my theory is that there was no will to get rid of the pope,

but only to terrify him.

The attack was the last warning,

because if one wanted to kill the pope,

it would have been enough to use bullets with mercury.

And then just a wound, even if it was not dangerous,

would be fatal.

You can't negotiate with a dead man,

but you can with a frightened one.

Yes, indeed.

There were microphones placed in various offices of the Vatican.

Cardinal Agostino Casaroli was the secretary of state.

It has been confirmed by a document of the Italian secret services

that bugs were found inside his apartment.

He was being spied on.

Bugs were found, microphones.

Those rooms were being listened to.

And even more serious,

John Paul II was also being listened to.

It was clear that there were microphones in his apartment as well.

What intel could be obtained with these bugs,

possibly combined with other information on his daily habits

and possibly his state of health?

It could be someone against the pope.

This one or another one, they would also like to eliminate

not only Pope Ratzinger, but also Pope Francis inside the Vatican.

When we followed the "internal leads,"

we encountered a few stumbling blocks,

in part because answering many of our questions

would have impinged on Vatican sovereignty.

There are small elements that suggest

that there may have been something, perhaps not an order,

but a tacit agreement within some dark power

that wanted the pope to be eliminated.

In my case, there was nothing.

There is no Vatican conspiracy.

How many shots were fired that day?

Several inquiries have risen up around this issue

of how many gunshots were fired by Ali Ağca.

He has always claimed to have fired twice,

and that when he was about to fire the third,

which was supposed to be the deadly one,

his gun jammed.

There were, however, other witnesses

who said they heard more gunshots, at least one more gunshot.

Throughout the investigation into the attack on John Paul II,

the judges, who tried very hard,

wanted to know if there was another shooter.

And that's why they needed to recover

this alleged third bullet which had been fired during the attack

and which had found itself embedded in the door of the popemobile.

There was a photographer, a man who was in St. Peter's Square,

that had taken pictures of the pope.

Apparently, in one of his photos, he managed to capture a man,

Oral Çelik, another Turk, a member of the Grey Wolves,

fleeing St. Peter's Square.

He is photographed from behind, holding a gun,

perhaps the one which fired the third shot,

considering that Ali Ağca's gun jammed.

I made an enlargement of the photo.

Are you sure it's Oral Çelik?

Yes, certainly.

Do you recognize the person in the photo?

Yes, it's Oral Çelik. I've been saying that for three years.

Mm?

I've been saying it for three years that it's Oral Çelik.

It's not another person.

On this subject, during the period in which he collaborated,

Ağca was very precise.

He stated

that there were two shooters

who planned this attack on the pope,

himself and Oral Çelik.

When the pope started his tour of the square,

he and Oral Çelik

were each placed on one side of the aisle.

But you see this picture,

this... who appears to be running away with a gun in his hand

is a plainclothes Italian policeman.

Here. This is the first time I reveal this

because there was no occasion to reveal it.

This is a plainclothes policeman who escaped

that day to the Vatican.

Who knows for what reason or on duty?

Listen to me carefully.

Forget everything you've heard before about the Bulgarian lead, all that.

When the pope arrives in front of the crowd,

the shooters shoot him with two guns.

Two other men were there with Ağca.

So examining that bullet was critical.

It was an exhibit to prove that there had been another shot,

that this shot possibly came from another Browning,

and from there, to be able to complete the scenario of the attack,

to prove that there was an accomplice and a conspiracy,

and then to investigate the question of the sponsors.

Here is a semi-automatic pistol

with a cartridge case that was found

at the crime scene on the square, and a projectile.

These are the two components that make up a live cartridge.

We showed that a similar gun and cartridge

were used in the assassination attempt on the pope.

One thing stands out.

This projectile has a jacket.

It is not made purely of lead.

It doesn't kill, it merely wounds.

Hence, the pistol used was not intended to kill the pope,

but rather only to wound him.

At the time,

when we decided that the three-shot theory was plausible,

my collaborators and I started looking for the third bullet.

And do you know where we found the third bullet?

In the crown of the Fátima Virgin.

This weekend, Pope Francis travels to Fátima, Portugal

to celebrate the 100th anniversary of a mysterious apparition

that appeared to three children.

The apparition told the children in 1917 about the two world wars,

the fall of communist Russia, and a third secret,

which was more recently revealed to be

the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.

I believe Ali Ağca is an extraordinarily smart person.

He is by no means a fool.

I believe that Ali Ağca started changing his storyline

and giving many different versions to save his life.

And from that moment on, he started changing versions

and giving delusional visions of what happened,

connecting everything to the third secret of Fátima

and proclaiming himself to be Jesus Christ on Earth.

I will resuscitate men who have been scientifically declared dead,

as long as the Vatican tells the truth

that I am the only Jesus Christ.

I will resuscitate the men scientifically,

before Ronald Reagan.

That bullet, which hit John Paul II

and wounded him in the abdomen

and which was found inside the popemobile, the Campagnola,

the pope himself decided to set it in the crown

of the statue of Our Lady of Fátima, because he has always maintained

that he had been miraculously saved by Our Lady of Fátima.

That is why a ballistic analysis of that bullet was never authorized,

although we could have learned the truth from it.

If we had recovered this bullet,

we could have analyzed it,

proven that it had not been shot by Ali Ağca's Browning.

We already knew that this Browning had fired two shots.

If only I could have had it analyzed.

But for John Paul II,

it is a symbolic way to say to those who organized this attack,

"I know, I forgive you, and I seal the deal forever."

"We don't talk about it anymore."

There is absolutely no third bullet.

It does not exist.

You need to see the images

that are in the hands of the Scientific Police of Rome.

I believe Ali Ağca doesn't really know who ordered the murder,

the attempted murder of John Paul II.

I believe he received orders,

received some money to do his job as a professional killer.

The attack on John Paul II is certainly a story

which inspired the most writers and the most articles to be written,

the most versions.

Perhaps we will know in 50 years,

perhaps in 100 years. It will be discovered that, in reality,

that a cardinal or another prelate was a terrible secret service man

who had the task of eliminating the pope.

This is a truly incredible event.

There is a man who suffers,

and then he comes to visit you.

Because throughout the history of the world, there is revenge.

Then he came to see me.

And naturally,

I wasn't expecting it.

Then the director of the prison said that the pope wanted to visit me.

I said that I would be very happy.

So the pope came, incredibly,

like he was coming to see a friend or a neighbor.

He said, "Good morning, Ali."

Naturally...

I welcomed him as a friend, more like a brother.

And then...

I asked if he forgave me.

He answered, "Yes, immediately on Vatican Radio."

Then I asked, "Do you pray for me?"

He answered, "Yes, every day."

This was astonishing.

The pope was actually praying for me every day?

You feel liberated.

Eh...

Great happiness, great serenity.

For me, it was a historic moment,

an unforgettable moment in my life.

The pope's forgiveness was like a miracle.

In my opinion, it will remain a mystery, because I don't think

it will ever be possible to find the smoking gun,

to identify who organized the attack on the pope.

We haven't been able to reach a verdict.

We are still incapable of giving the final word.

In time, I believe the truth will come to light.

But the historical truth will take a long time.

Ağca served 19 years in an Italian jail for the shooting.

He was released in 2000 and then served another ten years

in Turkey for the murder of a newspaper editor.

Now, more than 30 years later,

that act of forgiveness brought him back to the Vatican

to pay his respects at the pope saint's tomb.

I've come because December 27

is the anniversary of my meeting with the pope in 1983.

I'm happy to be here in St. Peter's Square,

the place where the miracle took place and the home of Christianity.

I went there to visit him,

and once I was in front of the pope's tomb, I said,

"Brother Karol Wojtyła,

I have come to honor your memory."

"That is why I'm here."

An energy, let's say, something superhuman, supernatural,

he said, "You had to do it."

By that, he means that it had to happen.