Word: martella
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...remarkably stingy in sharing its information. The French are believed to have briefed Washington only after they knew that what Mantarov had to say was going to be made public. Nor does it appear that the French told Italian authorities about Mantarov, despite the fact that Italian Judge Ilario Martella has been conducting a meticulous investigation into the assassination attempt for the past 17 months. When TIME Rome Correspondent Barry Kalb asked Martella last week if he had been told about Mantarov, Martella replied flatly: "Never...
Ever since that fateful day in St. Peter's Square, Italian authorities have suspected that Agca had accomplices. But at his trial in July 1981 the Turkish terrorist stoutly insisted that he had acted alone. In the spring of 1982 Agca began changing his story. He reportedly told Martella that while staying in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in 1980, he was offered 3 million deutsche marks (then worth $1.25 million) to kill the Pope by Bekir Celenk, a shadowy Turkish businessman with ties to his country's arms and drug smugglers. In Rome, Agca said...
...fall that he had accomplices in his attempt on the Pope's life. Not only had Sergei Ivanov Antonov, the head of Bulgaria's Balkan Airlines office in Rome, and two embassy officials plotted the shooting of the Pope in May, Agca reportedly told investigating Judge Ilario Martella, they had also plotted the murder of Walesa when he journeyed to Rome four months earlier for his meeting with the Pontiff. Agca said an Italian union official was involved in the plan. That man, Judge Martella reasoned, may have been Luigi Scricciolo, an Italian labor union official...
...Martella passed on his suspicion that Scricciolo was also implicated in the Walesa plot to the magistrate in charge of the Scricciolo investigation, Judge Ferdinando Imposimato. After questioning Agca, he has now pieced together the details of the alleged plot to kill Walesa. In addition to naming Agca and the three Bulgarian officials implicated in the papal shooting, Imposimato issued official warnings last week to Scricciolo, Ivan Donchev, a former second secretary at the Bulgarian embassy who is now in Sofia, and Salvatore Scordo, a former union employee in the same union as Scricciolo. The seven alleged conspirators reportedly concluded...
...provocation is beginning." Under Italian law, investigating magistrates do not need to explain their decisions as they prepare a case, but it seems that Agca's charges alone prompted Judge Imposimato to issue the warnings last week. Agca has changed his story in the past, however, and Judge Martella has yet to announce major breakthroughs in his seven-month investigation into Agca's charges of a Bulgarian-sponsored plot to kill the Pope. Whatever the truth of the latest allegations, each new probe uncovers increasing evidence of Bulgarian-sponsored efforts to destabilize an important member of the Western...