Word: bulgarians
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Wiretaps of phone calls in which the Turkish gunman mutters that he received the money and says he will now carry out his assignment. Reports that the gunman met with a suspected Bulgarian agent at a small hotel in Rome to plot the murder of Polish Labor Leader Lech Walesa. Word that a key witness recants her testimony and thus threatens the alibi of the Bulgarian, who issues a denial that he aided the Turk...
According to published reports of his confession to Italian Judge Ilario Martella last year, Agca contended that during a seven-week stay in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in 1980, he was offered $1.5 million to kill the Pope. The man Agca said made the proposition is Bekir Çelenk, a shadowy Turkish businessman whose dealings often brought him to Bulgaria. Çelenk last week again denied that he had ever met Agca, but he admitted that the two had stayed at the same Sofia hotel at the same time in July...
...sign of how seriously the Soviets take the accusations, which have grown out of a continuing Italian investigation into the attempt by Turkish Terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca to assassinate the Pope. Agca, who was sentenced to life imprisonment last July, has told Italian investigators that his accomplices included three Bulgarian agents, two of whom, he said, drove him to St. Peter's Square the day of the shooting...
...Soviet press also charged that the CIA had fabricated rumors of Soviet and Bulgarian involvement in the papal plot in order to undermine the Warsaw Pact. The "Bulgarian connection," a Soviet TV commentator noted, is like the Reichstag fire that was believed to have been set by Hitler's agents and blamed on Communists, thus helping to consolidate Nazi power. Said the Soviet newsman: "Half a century later, antisocialists are [again] preparing a war against the socialist community." A day later, Radio Moscow predicted confidently that Sergei Ivanov Antonov, one of the Bulgarians fingered by Agca, would be released...
Antonov's lawyers have demanded that their client be freed on the basis of testimony by ten Italian and Bulgarian witnesses who swear he was not in Agca's company on the day of the shooting or the two days prior to it, as Agca has claimed. This week Ilario Martella, the Italian magistrate investigating the papal plot, must come to a decision on Antonov's alibis. It may hinge on other evidence he is gathering. West Germany informed Martella last week that it had agreed to his request for the extradition of Musa Serdar Çelebi...