Reprise at St. Peter's

"Here's where the two Bulgarians let me out, and here's the store where I bought several rolls of film..." Thus for two hours last week did Mehmet Ali Agca, 25, the confessed Turkish terrorist who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II, re-enact the May 13, 1981, shooting in St. Peter's Square in Rome. The walk-through had been ordered by Judge Ilario Martella, the Italian magistrate who has been investigating the theory that the shooting was the result of a conspiracy involving Bulgarian accomplices. Wearing jeans, a blue turtleneck sweater, tennis shoes and a stubby growth of beard, Agca looked tired and nervous as he retraced his steps under the watchful eyes of, among others, Judge Martella and defense attorneys for Sergei Antonov, the Balkan Airlines representative whom Agca has accused of complicity. In his guided tour, Agca made one seemingly minor but possibly important new revelation: he said that he had stopped in one of the shops along the square to buy film with which to take souvenir photographs of the Pope. One of Antonov's lawyers later said that for Agca to have been thinking of taking photographs at the moment he was planning the assassination "is absurd," and casts further doubt on his story.

Magistrate Martella has maintained a strict silence on the inquiry, though last month he informed Agca that he was under investigation for slandering Antonov, apparently by implicating the Bulgarian in an alleged plot to kill Polish Labor Leader Lech Walesa earlier that same year. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.