Sergei Antonov, 59, Bulgarian Accused in Plot to Kill a Pope, Is Dead

Reuters. Sergei Antonov, in an undated photo.


Sergei Antonov, 59, Bulgarian Accused in Plot to Kill a Pope, Is Dead
By MATTHEW BRUNWASSER

Sergei Antonov, a key figure in the so-called Bulgarian connection in the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, was found dead in his apartment in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Wednesday. He was 59.
He apparently died of natural causes, the press office of the Bulgarian Interior Ministry said.
The story of one of the most notorious plots said to have taken place during the cold war was first reported by Claire Sterling in Reader’s Digest in 1982. The article suggested that the Soviet Union, threatened by a Polish pope at a time when the anti-Communist Solidarity movement was growing in Poland, had enlisted the Bulgarian secret services and Turkish militants to assassinate John Paul II.
Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who shot the pope, was a member of the Grey Wolves, an extremist nationalist group in Turkey. He said after his arrest that Mr. Antonov, a representative in Rome of Balkan Airlines, then Bulgaria’s state-owned airline, had been an accomplice on behalf of the Bulgarian intelligence services.
Mr. Agca also named as co-conspirators two other Bulgarians in the Bulgarian Embassy in Rome: Zhelyo Vasilev, the secretary of the military attaché, and Todor Aivazov, an accountant at the embassy. Both returned to Bulgaria before arrests were made in the case.
Mr. Antonov was arrested in 1982 and spent four years in detention in Italy during the trial. He was acquitted on all charges for lack of evidence.
After returning to Bulgaria in 1986 he was largely a shut-in, avoiding journalists and shunning public attention. He had suffered declining mental and physical health in the years before his death.
When Pope John Paul visited Bulgaria in 2002, he said that he had never believed that there had been a so-called Bulgarian connection in the attempt on his life.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company



BULGARIAN DIES LEAVING UNSOLVED MYSTERY AROUND ATTEMPT TO KILL POPE - AFP
09:04 Fri 03 Aug 2007
Sergei Antonov, the Bulgarian who was unfairly accused of involvement in the 1981 attempted murder of Pope John Paul II, has died, leaving mysteries as his legacy.
Antonov was found dead in his home on August 1 2007. He had been dead for several days before he was found, Agence France-Presse said.
Antonov was arrested in 1982 after Ali Agca, the man recorded on footage aiming a handgun at the Pope, said that Antonov had sent him a letter and a pistol with instructions to murder the Pope. At the time, Antonov was an employee of Bulgaria’s Balkan Airlines office in Rome.
The trial of Antonov came to an end in 1986 because of lack of evidence against him. Antonov was released, but in bad health.
After returning to Bulgaria, Antonov was in effect a recluse, Italian news agency ANSA said, as quoted by netinfo.bg.
Antonov’s name would remain forever linked to the so-called “Bulgarian trace” in the attempt to kill the Pope, ANSA said. Authorities in Italy at that time believed that the communist-era Kremlin had ordered the murder of the Pope by a Bulgarian-led team. A book by a journalist, purporting that her information was based on access to intelligence sources, aggravated this perception. Critics of the theory said that the allegations were unsubstantiated, based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence, and based on pandering to right-wing political agendas in the Western world of the time.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) said that for Bulgarians, Antonov was a symbol of the Cold War. It is not known which, or how many, Bulgarians were canvassed to support this assertion.



Bulgarian Antonov accused in plot attempt on Pope in '82 found dead
Sergei Antonov, 59, a Bulgarian implicated in the attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, has died in Sofia, news agency BTA said today. The agency quoted Georgi Gelev, a hospital official, as saying that Antonov had been found dead in his apartment. Gelev said Antonov had died several days ago, but did not say what caused his death.
Italy had accused Antonov, formerly a Rome-based representative of Bulgaria's Balkan Airlines, of complicity with Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot and wounded the Pope in Rome in May 1981. Ali Agca, the man arrested on the spot and sentenced for the attack, told police that Antonov had given him the pistol he fired against the Pope and that the Bulgarian secret services were implicated. Antonov was arrested in 1982 but was acquitted for lack of evidence four years later.
Two other Bulgarians also named by Agca – military attache secretary Zhelyo Vasilev and accountant Todor Ayvazov from the Bulgarian embassy in Rome - managed to return to Bulgaria before being arrested.
He returned to Sofia mentally scarred and physically devastated and his wife left him, Agence France Press writes. The tall, thin man with a moustache and thick spectacles rarely spoke and lived alone on a small government pensionē, the agency expands. He was reportedly unable to carry on a conversation or concentrate on complex tasks and refused to speak in public about his time in Italian custody. His condition prompted speculation that he had been mistreated during the investigation, BTA says.
In 2000, Bulgaria’s President Petar Stoyanov suggested the country should seek a legal exoneration of Antonov, saying it was "important for the sake of clearing Bulgaria's image." John Paul II sought to lay the issue to rest in 2002, declaring during a visit to Bulgaria that he had never believed there was a Bulgarian connection to the shooting, news agency adds.
The opening of Bulgaria's secret service archives in the years after the fall of communism in 1989 also failed to prove a Bulgarian link to the plot, Agence France Press reports. It adds that the Bulgarian communist state had always insisted that the CIA concocted the charges to tarnish Bulgaria, then a strongly pro-Moscow satellite of the Soviet Union.
NBC News reported in September, 1982, that it had found evidence suggesting that Pope John Paul II was the target of an assassination attempt with the knowledge and perhaps the assistance of Soviet and Bulgarian intelligence agencies. NBC News said the Pope was targeted because of his strong support of the Solidarity movement in Poland.



The Pope forgave his would-be killer two years after Mehmet Ali Agca shot the pontiff in the abdomen during a general audience in 1981 on St Peter's Square. Photo by PAP


Pope Would-Be Killer Speaks of Bulgaria's Connection in "The Acga Code"
2 August 2007, Thursday
Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who pulled the trigger against Pope John Paul II in 1981, has vowed to reveal the truth about the so-called Bulgarian connection in the assassination attempt in a book.
"The book has already been completed and will be titled "The Acga Code", Fatih Ali, a man responsible for Ali Agca's public relations, said in an interview for Darik News speaking on the phone from Istanbul. Fatih was approached a day after Sergei Antonov, the Bulgarian who was wrongly accused of involvement in the shooting, was found dead in his Sofia flat.
"Pope John Paul II pardoned him. Besides there is an end to any punishment. Agca served his sentence, but he is still behind bars. I don't know why they are keeping him in jail. Someone definitely wants him to be a prisoner," Fatih Ali said.
In January 2006 a Turkish court rules that Agca should return to prison to serve more time for killing a journalist and for other crimes committed in Turkey. The ruling by a panel of judges on an appeals court came eight days after Agca, 48, was released from an Istanbul prison.
He served 19 years in prison in Italy for shooting the pope on May 13, 1981, and 5 1/2 years of a 10-year sentence in Turkey for the murder of journalist Abdi Ipekci in 1979. In ordering his release, the local court had counted the time served in Italy, but the decision outraged many Turks.