Mehmet Ali Ağca released from prison

As an infamous assassin prepares to walk out of prison, Turkey is thrown back three decades to more troubled times.

Mehmet Ali Ağca is known for killing a Turkish journalist Abdi İpekçi  in 1979 and then attempting to kill late Pope John Paul II in 1981. Controversy has followed Ağca until today and now people want to know his true motivations and the forces behind his actions.

The release from prison Monday of the man who killed a journalist in Istanbul and then attempted to murder the late Pope John Paul II at the Vatican will not end the controversy surrounding him.

Globally, Mehmet Ali Ağca is known as the man who attempted to assassinate the late pope, but in Turkey he is also a dark and erratic figure from the country’s most troubling times. The infamous murderer is set to be released from prison Monday after nearly three decades of imprisonment in Italy and Turkey.

Ağca’s dark star rose in the aftermath of his assassination of experienced journalist Abdi İpekçi on Feb. 1, 1979. At the time, Turkey was a country torn between polarizing ideologies and in the grips of unpredictable terror. It was not until many years later that the Turkish public would come face to face with the terrifying truth that the terror that had so totally seized them before the Sept. 12, 1980 coup was a façade that hid a series of criminal and political interests. And the poster boy for the sinister machinations and convergence of those interests was the same man who had tried to kill the pope.

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