An Italian parliamentary commission has concluded that the Soviet Union was behind the 1981 attempt to kill Pope John Paul II, claiming to solve an enduring mystery that the pontiff himself addressed in his last days.
A draft report made available on Thursday to reporters said the commission held that the pope was a danger to the Soviet bloc because of his support for the Solidarity labor movement in his native Poland. Solidarity was the first free trade union in communist eastern Europe.
It said Moscow was alarmed because "Poland was the main military base of the Warsaw Pact, its main supply lines and troop concentrations were there."
"This commission believes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leaders of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate the pope Karol Wojtyla," the commission's draft report said, referring to the former pope by his civilian name.
The draft has no bearing on any judicial investigations, which have long been closed.
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Boris Labusov denied the assertion, the Interfax news agency reported, saying "all assertions of any kind of participation in the attempt on the pope's life by Soviet special services, including foreign intelligence, are completely absurd."
If the commission approves the report in its final form, it would be the first time an official body has blamed the Soviet Union.
The report also said a photograph showed that Sergei Antonov, a Bulgarian man acquitted of involvement in the May 13, 1981, assassination attempt was in St. Peter's Square when the pontiff was shot by Mehmet Ali Agca.
The Bulgarian secret service was allegedly working for Soviet military intelligence, but the Italian court held that the evidence was insufficient to convict the Bulgarians in the plot.
Agca, a Turk, has changed his story often, and investigators said it was never clear who he was working for.
He initially blamed the Soviets.
In 1991, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev denied there was any complicity by the KGB, the Soviet-era security service.
The Italian report said Soviet military intelligence -- and not the KGB -- was responsible.
In Bulgaria, Foreign Ministry spokesman Dimiter Tsanchev told reporters that the case had been closed with the court decision in Rome in March 1986.
Agca served 19 years in an Italian prison for shooting the pope and then five-and-a-half years in Turkey for murdering journalist Abdi Ipekci. He will be released in 2010.
The Italian commission was originally established to investigate any KGB penetration of Italy during the Cold War.
The commission president, Paolo Guzzanti, said he decided to investigate the 1981 shooting after John Paul said in his book, Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums, that "someone else planned it, someone else commissioned it." The book came out just weeks before the pope's death in April.
The passage drew immediate interest because during a visit to Poland in 2002, he appeared to put the issue to rest, saying he never believed there was a Bulgarian connection to Agca.
The report said the commission used all the evidence gathered during various trials in Italy as well as information given by a French anti-terrorism judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere.
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