The shots sounded like the popping of a string of firecrackers. It was May 13, 1981, a bright spring day in Rome. Pope John Paul II was leaning out of his open Jeep, arms stretched forward in a gesture of greeting to a young girl dressed in white. It was a little after 5 p.m.; the general papal audience, held weekly at St. Peter's Square, was about to begin. For a moment, the pope stood immobile in his open campagnola. Then his legs buckled, and he fell into the arms of his personal secretary. Bright-red blood gushed from his belly, staining the front of his white cassock. After a moment's hesitation, the pope's driver gunned the engine and sped to an ambulance, his passenger, bleeding profusely, softly murmuring in Polish, "Madonna, Madonna" and "I feel great pain."
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Our photo gallery spans the pope's youth to his last days at the vatican.
Mehmet Ali Agca had watched the pope enter the square minutes earlier. Hemmed in on all sides by the thousands of well-wishers packing the square, the 23-year-old Turkish would-be assassin watched the Popemobile crawl through the crowd, stopping occasionally so the pope could shake hands with pilgrims and kiss their children. Clenching a Browning 9-mm semiautomatic pistol in one hand, he waited for the pontiff to come within range. When the car completed a second circuit of the square, Agca took aim over the heads of the crowd and fired at least two shots. He saw the pope fall and tried to sprint away, but the mob closed in around him, preventing his escape until the police arrived.
The world held its breath as the pope, only days away from his 61st birthday, was rushed to a hospital. He had lost 60 percent of his blood through a massive wound in his abdomen. He was already fading in and out of consciousness. Before he was wheeled into surgery, John Paul, gray-faced and fragile, reached out to a nurse and asked the question on the minds of millions: "Perche l'hanno fatto? [Why did they do it?]"
More than two decades later, it is a question that still vexes historians and intelligence experts. Assassination is not new to the papacy (more than 40 popes have been murdered, all killed before the year 1100). But the attack on John Paul was unique: Not only did this pope survive and flourish, but the reasons for attempted murder have never been completely explained.
Agca himself has offered a variety of explanations over the years. Immediately after he was arrested, he claimed to be an "international terrorist" with no political ties and insisted he'd acted alone. He was quickly linked, though, to a right-wing Turkish terrorist group known as the Gray Wolves, an organization responsible for dozens of political killings in Turkey. Agca had been connected to the group two years earlier, in 1979, when he had confessed to the murder of the editor of a Turkish newspaper in Istanbul. After mysteriously escaping from a maximum-security prison in Turkey, Agca sent a letter to the newspaper's offices in Istanbul threatening to kill John Paul on an upcoming visit to Turkey. He called John Paul a "Crusader Commander" and insisted that if the visit wasn't called off, he would "definitely shoot the pope. This is the only reason I escaped from prison."
