Word: turkishly
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...public show trials and confessions exacted through torture, the random arrests and midnight executions in the infamous Lubyanka prison. KGB "sleepers" penetrating to the heart of Western intelligence services are now a staple of espionage fiction, film?and reality. Reports that Bulgarian agents in Rome may have aided Turkish Terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca in his attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in May 1981 have only added to Western suspicions of the KGB. In the view of many Westerners, the KGB would surely have been behind any Bulgarian plot to murder the spiritual leader of the world...
...square just off Sofia's Ruski Boulevard facing the National Assembly stands a statue of Tsar Alexander II, ruler of Russia from 1855 to 1881. A prerevolutionary Tsar being honored in a Communist country? History provides the explanation: Alexander II freed the Bulgarians from five centuries of Turkish rule in 1878, at a cost of 200,000 Russian lives. Unlike most of Eastern Europe, Bulgaria regards the U.S.S.R. as its liberator, not its conqueror. The two countries share the Cyrillic alphabet and speak similar languages. Though it is difficult to measure the affection felt by the Bulgarian people toward...
Investigating the 1981 assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II is like putting together a maddeningly complex jigsaw puzzle. The picture remains far from complete, and there is no proof of the growing suspicion that the Soviet Union, acting through Bulgaria, was behind Turkish Terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca's effort to kill the Pope, or even aware of the attempt. But the latest fragments make the inquiry more tantalizing than ever...
...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...
...contention that the Bulgarians conspired with him remains unproven. But intriguing details keep emerging that support Agca's account of his activities before the shooting. In a meeting on March 3, 1981, at the Hotel Rŭtli in Zurich, Musa Serdar Çelebi, a right-wing Turkish activist with rinks to Çelenk and Bulgaria, also offered Agca $1.5 million to kill the Pope. Çelebi reportedly was acting as middleman for Çelenk, and may have been either simply renewing his fellow Turk's offer or actually paying Agca the money. Some time in late April...