Turkey ends Pope gunman freedom [Agca rearrested]

The Turkish gunman who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981 has been rearrested after a court ruled he should return to prison, eight days after being freed. Turkey's highest appeals court overturned the decision which allowed Mehmet Ali Agca to be released early.

Agca was jailed for bank robbery and murder committed before the attempt on the Pope's life, for which he served nearly 20 years in Italy.

Agca, now 48, shot the Pope in St Peter's Square in 1981, but has never explained why. The pontiff later visited him in jail and publicly forgave him.

Police said Agca had been arrested in Istanbul's Kartal district on Friday afternoon and had been taken to police headquarters.

Justice Minister Cemil Cicek had argued Agca should serve a full 10-year term for the 1979 murder of left-wing Turkish journalist Abdi Ipekci and two bank robberies.

His lawyer, Mustafa Demirbag, told Turkey's NTV channel that they would respect "all decisions by the independent Turkish court".

Agca was a 23-year-old known criminal with links to Turkish far-right paramilitaries at the time of the attack in Rome.

He fired several times at the late Pope John Paul II as he waved to crowds from an open car.

The critically wounded pontiff underwent emergency surgery for serious wounds to the abdomen and hand. According to his own account, he only just survived.

He met his attacker two years later in an Italian prison, when he publicly forgave him.

There were claims that the Soviet KGB and its Bulgarian counterpart were behind the assassination attempt, but prosecutors at a trial in 1986 failed to prove a link to the Bulgarian secret service.

On a 2002 visit to Sofia, John Paul II said he had never believed in a Bulgarian link to the shooting.

The Russians have always maintained that the KGB was not responsible, even indirectly, for the attempt on the pontiff's life.

Islamic’ paramilitaries RP leader Erbakan is a right-wing politician who organised Islamic paramilitaries while part of various Turkish governments. These paramilitaries and the allied fascist Grey Wolves of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP) were used throughout the 1970s and 1980s against the then powerful Turkish left and workers’ movement. The secular military and the Motherland Party (ANAP), the dominant right-wing party, to which the military ceded limited power in the 1980s, also used Islamic ideology as a counterweight to the left. Under the military dictatorship of Evren and the military-backed ANAP’s Turgut Ozal in the 1980s, most of the Islamic schools were set up&38212;far more than under Erbakan. ANAP saw itself as a bridge between traditional secular Kemalism and Islamic ideology. Yet now ANAP, in the new coalition with the so-called Democratic Left (DL), is leading the military-backed attack on these schools and on Islam....

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/294.html

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YEAH. Think I'll send them a check...

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