Word: martella
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...that the allegations did not reflect the Kremlin's official view. A State Department aide characterized the exchange somewhat differently. Said the official: "There was a lot of shouting." Some Western diplomats in Moscow speculated that the Soviet charges were meant to deflect attention from Italian Judge Ilario Martella's report indicting three Bulgarians (and by implication the Soviet KGB) for conspiring to murder Pope John Paul...
Among them is Zhelio Vassilev, a former official of the Bulgarian embassy in Rome, who is currently in Sofia and thus beyond the reach of Italian law. Martella relates that according to Agca, Vassilev urged at a May 10, 1981, meeting of the conspirators that the shooting be carried out as soon as possible. According to Agca, Vassilev emphasized urgency be cause "French and Rumanian secret services . . . had come to know about the possibility of [the assassination], and that the news had probably been given to them by some Bulgarian who played a double-cross." Martella reports that "many confirmations...
...Martella's case for a conspiracy trial, which is expected to begin some time next year, repeatedly suggests that prosecutors follow up on his findings. Only a fraction of the evidence gathered by Martella during nearly three years of investigation has been made public...