Italy a Thicket of Contradictions

By John Greenwald.

Mehmet Ali Agca was at it again. "I am Jesus Christ," bellowed the man who shot Pope John Paul II. "All the world will be destroyed." The now familiar outburst came on March 22, the final day of the marathon "Bulgarian connection" trial in Rome. The prosecution's aim: to prove that the Turkish gunman, who was convicted in 1981 of gravely wounding the Pope on May 13 of that year in St. Peter's Square, was working for Bulgarian agents and, by implication, the Soviet Union. The ten-month trial of Agca's alleged accomplices--and of Agca himself for illegal possession of the pistol that he used to shoot the Pope--ended when Prosecutor Antonio Marini handed the case to the jury without a closing summary. "There were no new arguments for me to rebut," he explained later.

After 6 1/2 days of deliberation, the jury last week delivered its verdict. To the surprise of no one, the eight-member panel acquitted all three Bulgarian defendants on the technical grounds of insufficient evidence, following a formal recommendation made by Marini last month. Three of the Turkish defendants were acquitted on the same technicality. But one of them, Omer Bagci, was convicted of smuggling into Italy the Browning 9-mm semiautomatic pistol used in the shooting and was sentenced to three years in prison. Agca was also found guilty as charged and given an additional year in jail.

The acquittals amounted to less than a full declaration of innocence. Under Italian law, a court may fully absolve defendants or find that they cannot be convicted because of inadequate evidence. The verdicts were celebrated in Sofia and Moscow. The Soviet news agency TASS declared that charges of a Communist plot to kill the Pope had "crumbled to nothing." For his part, Marini vowed to fight on: "The case is still open. We are back to the starting point."

Half of the defendants were absent throughout the trial. The sole Bulgarian in court was Sergei Antonov, 37, the bespectacled deputy chief of Rome's Balkan Air office, who has been in Italian custody since 1982 and allegedly helped plan the plot. His presumed accomplices, Todor Aivazov, 43, and Zhelyo Vassilev, 44, Bulgarian embassy officials in Rome at the time of the shooting, were safely home in Sofia. Both left Italy shortly before Antonov's arrest as part of what Bulgarian officials called a normal embassy rotation. Two of the four Turkish defendants were also missing. Oral Celik, 27, the reputed second gunman who was photographed running from the scene of the shooting, is still at large. Mafia Boss Bekir Celenk, accused of delivering $1.2 million in cash from the Bulgarians to Agca, died last October of a heart attack in a Turkish prison. That left Bagci, 40, and Musa Serdar Celebi, 34, members of a right- wing Turkish group. Celebi was accused of funneling funds to Agca.

While the case may now be legally closed, the tortuous trial left many tantalizing questions unanswered. The most perplexing: How did Agca, 28, know so much about the Bulgarians, and particularly about Antonov, who consistently denied ever meeting him? The terrorist knew that Antonov gets winded after walking a few blocks, and correctly gave the names of Antonov's wife Rositza and his daughter Anya, and the address of Antonov's apartment on Rome's tree- lined Via Pola. Agca also knew that Vassilev has a tiny mole on his face that does not show up in photographs. Unless the Turk was fed such detailed information by someone--like the Italian secret service, as Antonov's lawyers have asserted--he evidently had close ties to the Bulgarians. Yet the trial proved nothing about the source of his knowledge.

Although it was quickly dubbed the trial of the century, the legal proceeding proved a nightmare for the Italians. The prosecution's case was based on charges by Agca, who began telling investigators of a conspiracy involving the Bulgarians and the Soviets after spending the first year of his life sentence in solitary confinement. The alleged reason for the attempt on the life of the Polish-born Pontiff: to silence a charismatic supporter of the defiant Solidarity movement in Poland. Once on the witness stand, though, Agca proved disastrously uncooperative. "In the name of God omnipotent," he roared on the second day, "I announce the end of the world. I am Jesus Christ reincarnate."

When he stopped ranting, Agca wove a thicket of contradictions. After stating that Antonov had been driving the sole getaway car near St. Peter's Square, he said that another auto with two accomplices was also waiting nearby. He asserted several times that he had met Antonov's daughter in the Bulgarian's apartment, but he later retracted the statement. In another switch, Agca first said that two conspirators were with him in the square, then raised the number to three. Such flip-flops nearly drove the prosecution wild. "Agca changed the cards on the table," said a rueful Marini. "Our problem was that I couldn't trust the testimony anymore."

Agca's conduct was another unsolved mystery of the trial. While some observers dismissed him as a madman, others found him to be quite sane. Said Marini: "Agca is not crazy, but he played crazy." Still, his motives remained murky. Agca disavows any strong political or religious ties, and openly calls himself an international terrorist, leading some experts to view him simply as a gun for hire. There was little disagreement, though, about his quickness of mind. "He is of uncommon intelligence," said Presiding Judge Severino Santiapichi. On the trial's final day, Agca offered this enigmatic summation: "I've always said my own truth, not that it's an absolute truth."

Even without Agca's maddening performance, the prosecution's case was weak from the start. The 1,243-page indictment proved to be filled with circumstantial evidence. After 97 court sessions, there was no firm evidence as to which accomplice may have been with Agca in St. Peter's Square. None of the cash that Agca said he was promised for the shooting has ever turned up. The prosecution showed that Agca received aid and money from Turkish friends, but nowhere is there proof that they intended to help him shoot the Pope. ( Rather, they may have been supporting one of the jewelry-store robberies or other holdups to which he admits. Says Claire Sterling, author of an influential book, The Time of the Assassins, which argues that there was indeed a plot: "I believe in the Bulgarian connection, but frankly, I couldn't have voted to convict those defendants on that evidence."

The trial was further hindered by language barriers and international red tape. The court made 24 trips to take testimony in West Germany, the Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland and France. Recalls Santiapichi: "With almost a hundred witnesses in court and defendants who spoke in three different languages, we were slowed down." To hear one witness in the Netherlands, the session had to be conducted in Turkish, Dutch, German and Italian. Quipped a visiting Australian judge at the sight of translators for the Bulgarian and Turkish defendants: "This is the trial of Babel."

The labyrinthine procedure strained Italy's judicial system and set off some internal political dissension. Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti remained openly skeptical about the Bulgarian connection and quietly restored full diplomatic relations with Sofia. Even the Vatican has re-established links: two years ago, John Paul II received Bulgaria's new Ambassador to Rome.

Given the obstacles and numbing complexities of the case, some observers have argued that it should never have come to trial. But the Italian judiciary felt honor-bound to move against the alleged assassins. Says Marini: "This trial had to take place." The legal proceedings, moreover, are not entirely finished. A Roman court has begun a new formal inquiry into the presumed plot and assigned a trio of senior investigators to handle it. In the Netherlands, officials continue to probe the background of a Turk who, on the final day of a 1985 papal visit, tried to enter the country with fake identity papers and a Browning that police say came from the same lot as Agca's.

No court judgment, from whatever quarter, is likely to still the debates that will continue to rage over the Bulgarian connection. Says Author Sterling: "There are two verdicts to this trial--the juridical one and the historical one." The first decision was reached last week, but the jury remains out on the second.

With reporting by Sam Allis and Judith Harris/Rome