Back Home, Another Sinister Plot

As Pope John Paul II touched down in Costa Rica last week, attention in Rome was distracted by new developments related to one of the darkest hours of the Pontiffs reign. Ever since the 1981 assassination attempt in St. Peter's Square, suspicion has grown that the convicted Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, took his orders from Bulgarian agents, who in turn might have been acting with the knowledge of the Soviet Union. To date, Italian investigators have arrested one Bulgarian official in Rome for alleged complicity in the plot, and accused two others. Now Italian officials have begun examining links between Agca and the Bulgarians in a second possible assassination plot. In "judicial communications" issued last week, a magistrate warned the Bulgarians, and four additional suspects that they are under investigation for participating in an alleged conspiracy to kill Polish Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa during his visit to Rome in January 1981.

The warnings, which do not amount to formal charges, stem from Agca's statements to an Italian magistrate last 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 who had helped plan Walesa's trip to Italy. In a separate investigation, Scricciolo has been charged with espionage and with acting as an intermediary between Bulgaria and the terrorist Red Brigades, notably in the kidnaping of U.S. General James Dozier one year ago.

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 that a shooting attempt was too risky, and decided instead to explode a bomb in Walesa's hotel room or in a nearby parked car. The resulting blast in downtown Rome, Judge Imposimato concluded, would have caused "a massacre." The alleged murder plot was never carried out, for reasons that are still unclear.

In a remarkable confirmation of Bulgaria's extensive clandestine network in Italy, Scricciolo's lawyer has told TIME that his client had frequent contact with Bulgarian officials, including one implicated in the shooting of the Pope. The Bulgarians, the lawyer added, quizzed Scricciolo about Walesa and about a number of sensitive military subjects. The Bulgarians also donated up to $7,200 to the newspaper of a left-wing Italian political party of which Scricciolo was a member. Scricciolo vehemently denies any part in a conspiracy to kill the Polish union leader and says he knows no military secrets. Dismissing the new allegations, the Bulgarian embassy in Rome declared, "It is unavoidable that a new stage in the campaign of slander and 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 alliance. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.