Posted on 01/20/2006 7:51:23 PM PST by mdittmar
ISTANBUL - The man who shot pope John Paul II in 1981, Mehmet Ali Agca, was remanded to Istanbul’s Kartal prison on Friday, after Turkey’s highest appeals court overturned the decision that released him from jail last week, media reported.
Agca entered the prison on the Asian side of the city in a police car after questioning by police and undergoing a health check, CNN-Turk television said.
He had been released from the prison on January 12 after nearly 25 years behind bars in Italy and Turkey.
Turkish police had earlier picked up Agca in Kartal district, the city governor Muammer Guler said.
“Agca did not resist arrest by our agents who went to look for him. There were no problems,” Guler said on the NTV news television channel, adding that he was taken to police headquarters.
There was no reaction from the current head of the Roman Catholic Church.”We will not make any comment,” Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro Valls told Italian news agency ANSA.
Earlier Friday the Court of Cassation ruled unanimously that Agca’s release should not have been allowed, the semi-official Anatolia news agency said.
The court went along with a request from Turkey’s Justice Minister Cemil Cicek after weeks of raging debate on whether the 48-year-old former hitman had served less time than he should for crimes he committed in Turkey before his release, including the murder of a well-known journalist, Avdi Ipekci.
Agca was set free thanks to a series of amnesties and other sentence reductions allowed in the penal code, but experts said deductions from his jail term had been miscalculated.
Agca was hardly seen in public after he was set free from jail.
When taken back in custody late Friday and brought to police headquarters in Istanbul, Agca, handcuffed and escorted by several police officers, shouted to a crowd of waiting journalists.
“I am the Messiah, I am the Messiah. I am not God, I proclaim the apocalypse,” he said.
The scene on several Turkish television channel also showed him speaking in English: “I am the Christ. I am not God.”
Similar remarks were reported earlier this week in a Turkish newspaper which published excerpts of letters Agca reportedly wrote during his last few years in prison.
He claimed to be the reincaration of Jesus Christ and also offered to assassinate Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, prompting speculation over Agca’s mental state or whether he was just playing the madman.
Reaction to his re-arrest from the ruling Justice and Development party came from Sadullah Ergin, vice president of the parliamentary group, who said the court’s decision “repaired” the lower court’s action which “was troubling to public opinion” in Turkey.
His lawyer Mustafa Demirbag said on NTV that they would respect ”all decisions by the independent Turkish court.”
Agca first came to public attention in Turkey in 1979, when he shot and killed Abdi Ipekci, the chief editor and columnist of the liberal daily Milliyet.
He escaped from the prison where he was awaiting trial and showed up at St. Peter’s Square, Rome, on May 13, 1981, where he shot and seriously wounded John Paul II. The reasons for his attack on the pope, and who sponsored him, remain a mystery.
After extradition from Italy in 2000, the former militant ultra-nationalist was jailed for the Ipekci murder and two robberies committed in the 1970s.
Former justice minister Hikmet Sami Turk said earlier he should have remained in jail until 2012 even with the most optimistic calculation of his sentence reductions.
The scary part is that there are Turks who see this man as a hero- may moderacy prevail in Turkey.
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