An Italian investigator, who was involved in the inquiry into the 1981 attempted murder of Pope John Paul II at the time, claims Bulgaria has provided misleading information about the stay here of Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who pulled the trigger against the pontiff.

Ilario Martella was the first magistrate to stand before the Italian parliamentary commission "Mitrokhin", which investigates the activities of Soviet secret services KGB in Italy in relation to the so-called Bulgarian connection in the shooting against John Paul II.

Investigator Martella told the commission that during his visit to Sofia in 1983 a massive disinformation campaign was launched, hampering his access to information about the other Turks, who were in Bulgaria together with Agca.

According to Martella Ali Agca entered Bulgaria with a false Indian passport after crossing Iran and Turkey. He stayed here for two months, he claims.

Following a visit by a Turkish-speaking Bulgarian investigator Ali Agca recanted from his claims that he was commissioned by Bulgaria on the orders of Soviet KGB, Martella told the commission.

Agca is said to have wrote a letter to Martella, saying that the Bulgarian investigators threatened him during their visit to the prison in Rome.

After nearly three years of investigation, in 1984 Judge Ilario Martella ordered three Bulgarians and four Turks to be tried for conspiring to kill the Pope and signed the secret 1,243-page summary of the case. The Italians arrested a Bulgarian airline official, accusing him of helping to plan and carry out the attack. They also charged two minor Bulgarian diplomats and four Turks as accomplices.

Bulgaria's Interior Ministry Secretary Lieutenant-General Boyko Borisov recently announced that Ali Agca has spend 37 days in Bulgaria under an Indian name eight months before the assassination attempt.

The sad news of Pope John Paul II death came just days after Italian media circulated a series of reports, implicating Bulgaria as part of the plot for the assassination in 1981.

Many Italian sources have indicated that Stasi files confirmed the direct involvement of Soviet KGB in masterminding the assassination and coordinating the participation of erstwhile Bulgarian communist secret services. These, in turn, resorted to Turkish extremists as the actual executors of the plan.

Italy announced plans to reopen an inquiry into the 1981 attempted murder of Pope John Paul II and approached Bulgaria after it vowed to grant it access to classified documents. The Italian investigators are positive that the Turkish mafia was serving the Bulgarian and Soviet secret services.

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