[5] Thirty-three years after his crime, Ağca visited Vatican City to lay white roses on the tomb of the recently canonized John Paul II, and said he wanted to meet Pope Francis, a request that was denied.

On 1 February 1979, in Istanbul, under orders from the Grey Wolves, he murdered Abdi İpekçi, editor of the major Turkish newspaper Milliyet.

After serving six months, he escaped with the help of Abdullah Çatlı, second-in-command of the Grey Wolves, and fled to Bulgaria, which was a base of operations for the Turkish mafia.

[10] Komisar added that at the scene of the Mercedes-Benz crash where Çatlı died, he was found with a passport under the name of "Mehmet Özbay" — an alias also used by Ağca.

[11] In 1979 The New York Times reported that Ağca, whom it called "the self-confessed killer of an Istanbul newspaperman", had described the Pope as "the masked leader of the Crusades" and threatened to shoot him if he did not cancel his planned visit to Turkey,[12] which went ahead in late November 1979.

Le Monde diplomatique, however, has alleged that the assassination attempt was organized by Abdullah Çatlı "in exchange for the sum of 3 million marks", paid by Bekir Çelenk to the Grey Wolves.

[16] According to Ağca, the plan was for him and the back-up gunman Oral Çelik to open fire in St. Peter's Square and escape to the Bulgarian embassy under the cover of the panic generated by a small explosion.

[18] Ağca's release was requested in the summer of 1983 by the alleged kidnappers of Emanuela Orlandi, the young daughter of a Vatican employee, who mysteriously disappeared in Rome in June of that year.

After serving almost 20 years of a life sentence in prison in Italy, at the request of Pope John Paul II, Ağca was pardoned by the then Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in June 2000 and deported to Turkey.

The single trial concerned the hijacking of Cengiz Aydos's taxi in 1979, robbing the Yıldırım jewellery store in Kızıltoprak on 22 March 1979 and stealing money from the Fruko soda storage on 4 April 1979.

On 18 January 2000, the judges dismissed the charges because of the statute of limitations on the case filed for the jewellery store robbery and for "breach of the Firearms Act" (law no.

[10] On 2 May 2008, Ağca asked to be awarded Polish citizenship as he wished to spend the final years of his life in Poland, Pope John Paul II's country of birth.

[26] Ağca stated that upon his release he wanted to visit Pope John Paul II's tomb and partner with Dan Brown on writing a book.

[30] It has also been alleged that the Soviet Union's KGB ordered the assassination, because of John Paul II's support for the Solidarity labor movement in Poland.

[31] When Ağca published his memoirs in 2013, his story changed completely,[32] writing that the Iranian government and Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the assassination attempt on John Paul II.

In transit from Turkey to Western Europe, he was delayed in Sofia because his fake Indian passport was of such poor quality that on several occasions he had to bribe officials who became suspicious.

[33] When Pope John Paul II visited him in prison in Italy, on 27 December 1983 (two and a half years after the assassination attempt), Ağca recalls in his memoirs he kissed the hand of the Pope, having kissed three years earlier the hand of Khomeini in Iran, and when asked, he told John Paul II that Ruhollah Khomeini ordered the assassination.

[34] Ağca's shooting of the Pope and possible KGB involvement is featured in Tom Clancy's 2002 novel Red Rabbit and Frederick Forsyth's novel The Fourth Protocol.