Italy's presidential pardon of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, has reminded Bulgarians of their own link to the event.

Italy's presidential pardon of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, has reminded Bulgarians of their own link to the event, a withdrawn man jailed for three years before he was released for lack of evidence. The Bulgarian angle to conspiracy theories on the assassination attempt involved Sergei Antonov, at the time the deputy representative in Rome of Balkans airlines, Bulgaria's national carrier. He has since become a ghost even in his own country, although he still works for the company. Antanov was arrested in Rome in 1982, after Agca asserted that the airline official had given him the pistol used to attack Pope John Paul II in Saint Peter's square. Two other Bulgarians also named by Agca -- a military attache and an accountant from the Bulgarian embassy in Rome -- were never arrested. On Friday, Agca created a stir at a court appearance in Istanbul on murder charges for the 1979 killing of Turkish journalist, for which he was condemned to death. "I am not the killer of Abdi Ipekci. I was an actor in this scenario. I was playing the part of the murderer," Agca told a packed courtroom before a judge warned him not to speak without being given the floor. During that time, Bulgaria denounced what it branded a plot by the US intelligence agency, the CIA, to implicate Sofia, at the time a close ally of Moscow. It denied each of Agca's allegations, which were contradictory and could not be proved in court.