Two Gunmen

By Roberto Suro

Indictments in the papal plot

"It must be held as certain that a plot existed to kill the Pope." After nearly three years of investigation, Judge Ilario Martella added official credibility last week to a suspicion long held by much of the world. The judge did not, however, say who directed the conspiracy or what its aims might have been. Instead, Martella ordered three Bulgarians and four Turks to be tried for conspiring to kill the Pope. In signing the secret 1,243-page summary of the case, Martella made another extraordinary allegation: two people fired at John Paul II, not one.

Even the most ardent proponents of a conspiracy theory have assumed until now that the only would-be assassin in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981, was Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish terrorist apprehended seconds after the shooting. But when Martella was ordered to re-open the investigation into the assassination attempt in November 1981, there was already some uncertainty about whether two or three shots had been fired at the Pontiff. Confusion also surrounded a photograph, taken by a tourist immediately after the shooting, that shows a young man running from the square. That man, according to Martella, was Oral Celik, 25, Agca's closest friend, who guided him to his first political crimes, helped him escape from a Turkish jail in 1979 and drew him into the plot to kill the Pope.

After extensive ballistics tests, Martella concluded that three shots had been fired at the Pope and that only the first two came from Agca's Browning pistol. The third bullet, which hit the Pope's left hand and right arm, was fired by Celik, according to the judge. That slug was never found, but a reconstruction of its trajectory showed that it could not have been fired by Agca. Though Agca at first tried to protect Celik, who investigators say was "like a brother" to him, he eventually confessed that Antonov Celik was in the square, though only to create a diversion so that Agca could escape. Celik has not been seen since the day of the shooting. The Italian press speculated last week that he may have been killed by the Bulgarians to keep him from talking.

Perhaps the most important figure indicted last week is Sergei Ivanov Antonov, 36, head of Bulgaria's Balkan Airlines office in Rome at the time of the assassination attempt and allegedly the plot's leader. Antonov remained in Italy even after authorities began to investigate the "Bulgarian connection" and was arrested in November 1982. Two other suspects, Todor Aivazov, 40, and Zhelio Vassilev, 42, are former officials of the Bulgarian embassy in Rome. They had returned to Sofia by the time warrants were first issued against them and remain beyond the reach of Italian law.

All three Bulgarians and Bekir Celenk, a shady Turkish Mafia figure accused of lining up Celik and Agca for the job, have insisted that they had nothing to do with the papal shooting and that they never even knew Agca. Martella claims to have contrary evidence on both counts. A problem for Martella's case, however, will be his chief witness, the inconsistent and sometimes unbelievable Agca.

The terrorist, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 1981, has offered detailed descriptions of the Bulgarians' personal lives, even mentioning Antonov's fascination with his collection of liquor miniatures. But Agca also revised, retracted and contradicted many of his statements. As Martella said last week, "Agca is an unpredictable person capable of anything."

Soft-spoken and courtly, Martella, 50, quietly insisted that his only job was to determine whether it was proper to hold a trial on this "extremely complex" matter. He was at pains to emphasize that his document is only an accusation, not a judgment. One avenue Martella discreetly refused to explore in public was the authorship of the conspiracy. A government prosecutor last June sent Martella a report, which was leaked to the press, asserting that "some political figure of great power," presumably in the Soviet Union, watched the rise of Poland's Solidarity labor movement and, "mindful of the vital needs of the Eastern bloc," decided that the Polish-born Pontiff must be killed.

Asked about that assertion, Martella would only say, "I limited myself to the facts."

--By Roberto Suro/Rome