Italy "the Trial of the Century"

By Jill Smolowe

Escorted from his cell in Rome's Rebibbia Prison by a heavy police convoy, Mehmet Ali Agca arrived in a high-security courtroom in Rome last week, presumably to tell a jury that he had been hired by Bulgarian intelligence officials to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981. But as the 27-year-old Turk settled into his white steel cage in a former gymnasium converted to a courtroom, he had loftier matters on his mind. "I am Jesus Christ!" Agca shouted. "I am omnipotent. I announce the end of the world. All will be destroyed." The bizarre outburst in the opening moments of the trial of three Bulgarians and five Turks accused of conspiring to kill the Pontiff made one thing clear: Italian prosecutors may face a difficult task in convincing the six-member jury that their star witness is credible.

If Agca's verbal pyrotechnics were jarring, other courtroom developments hinted of more drama to come. Prosecutor Antonio Marini persuaded the court to seek the questioning of four suspected Turkish terrorists, all under detention elsewhere in Western Europe, in connection with the alleged assassination conspiracy. Defense lawyers, meanwhile, tried to secure diplomatic immunity for two of the three accused Bulgarians. Most important, testimony by a Turkish defendant brought the first public confirmation of Agca's claim that he was only a cog in a wider conspiracy.

Suspicions that Agca had not acted alone in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981, surfaced shortly after the shooting. When Agca was tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment two months later, the presiding judge, Severino Santiapichi, who is also conducting the current trial, suggested that "hidden minds" had directed the Turk. Italian authorities reopened the case that autumn. The investigation heated up after Agca, in a series of sometimes contradictory jailhouse revelations, described a "Bulgarian connection." Two years later, an Italian prosecutor hinted that the Soviet Union might have been involved in a plot against the Pope, using Bulgarian agents. By October 1984, Ilario Martella, the investigating magistrate, had compiled sufficient evidence of a conspiracy to order the trial of the eight alleged co- conspirators being tried: three Turks and one Bulgarian in the courtroom, the others in absentia.

Of the missing defendants, Oral Celik, a 26-year-old Turk, presents the greatest mystery. In Martella's 1,243-page indictment, Celik stands accused not only of having helped orchestrate the purported plot but of actually firing, as Agca did, at the Pope. Celik, the indictment says, escaped from St. Peter's Square in the confusion that followed the assassination attempt and has eluded authorities since.

The prosecution scored a tentative first point last week when testimony by Turkish Defendant Omer Bagci, who allegedly had connections to a right-wing Turkish terrorist group, strengthened Agca's claims of a conspiracy. Bagci, 39, said that he had delivered a Browning 9-mm pistol to Agca in Milan four days before the shooting at the Vatican. Bagci's revelations could not have come at a better time for the prosecution. The same day, the mercurial Agca had stunned the court with the pronouncement that "the assault on the Pope is connected to the third secret of the Madonna of Fatima." Agca was referring to three messages the Virgin Mary is said to have given to children in the Portuguese town of Fatima in a series of apparitions beginning on May 13, 1917. Two of the messages deal with a vision of hell and a call to save Russia for Christianity; the third remains a secret known to the Pope and possibly some other church officials.

In the Soviet Union, where a national committee has been formed to issue statements in defense of Sergei Antonov, the former representative in Rome of Bulgaria's Balkan Airlines and the only Bulgarian defendant present in the courtroom, the press leaped on Agca's outbursts as evidence that his story was worthless. Prosecutor Marini disagreed. "When (Agca) begins to talk about facts," he said, "he is extremely reliable." Still, Marini was relieved when Bagci calmly, albeit reluctantly, held up under intense questioning.

Bagci's testimony also brought out the names of four Turks previously unmentioned in connection with the case: Mahmut Inan, Eyup Erdem, Oezdemir Vandettim and Uenal Erdal. The men, Bagci said, had helped him pass on to Agca the pistol that was used to shoot the Pope. Marini expressed hope that the court's move to subpoena three more Turks, held elsewhere in Western Europe, would produce fresh testimony. One of the three, Mehmet Sener, was convicted last week in Switzerland on heroin-smuggling charges. The court is also seeking to question a Turk identified as Aslam Samet. He was arrested by Dutch police during a papal visit May 14 for possessing a loaded Browning pistol that a Dutch prosecutor says came from the same "small lot of 21 weapons" as Agca's weapon. The revelation heightened a courtroom drama that the Italian press has billed as "the trial of the century."

With reporting by Roberto Suro/Rome