Relatives and friends paid their last respects to Sergei Antonov, the man who was wrongly accused of involvement in the 1981 assassination attempt on the late Pope John Paul II, on Saturday.

The ceremony took place at the Central Sofia Cemetery and gathered at one place more than 50 people. He was buried while one of his relatives read one of Antonov's poems.

The deputy head of the Bulgarian state security service Svilen Turmakov attended the ceremony. The service ascertained that Antonov was in no way involved in the papal shooting and was innocent all the time, Turmakov said.

Sergei Antonov, 58, was found dead in his flat in Sofia on Wednesday afternoon. He died of natural death, the autopsy showed.

On 13 May 1981 Pope John Paul II was shot and seriously wounded by Turkish gunman Ali Agca in St Peter's Square. The would-be killer never gave a motive, and mystery has continued to surround the assassination attempt. An alleged link between Agca and Bulgarian agents, and through them to the Soviet Union's KGB, fed speculations over the so-called Bulgarian connection for years on end.

Bulgarian Sergei Antonov, who was arrested after the shooting and held for more than three years in Italy, was acquitted over lack of evidence. At the time of the arrest Antonov was 32 and worked as a former manager in the Rome office of Balkan Air. Shattered and physically damaged, he returned to Bulgaria unable to carry on a conversation or concentrate on complex tasks, symptoms his friends say came from the use of psychotropic drugs in his interrogation.

During his historic visit to Bulgaria in May 2002 the pope said he never believed in the so-called Bulgarian connection.

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