When Mehmet Ali Agca shot the Pope from just 9ft away as he toured St Peter’s Square in Rome in May 1981, the Turkish gunman came within a fraction of an inch of changing the course of history.

The bullet broke the Pope’s finger and tore through his abdomen, then dropped between the pontiff and Father Stanislaw Dziwisz, his secretary, who caught John Paul II as he fell.

Almost any other trajectory for the bullet would have killed him. John Paul has since said he is convinced that Mary, the mother of God, intervened and saved him, just as predicted in the third secret of Fatima — which, stored away in the Vatican, he read after his recovery. In simple terms, the bungled assassination reaffirmed that the Pope believed it was his destiny to save the Catholic church.

Quite apart from his theory of divine intervention, a myriad of potential motives and backers for the hapless Agca has sprung up around an assassination attempt that rivals the shooting of President John F Kennedy in the conspiracy theorists’ lexicon.

The Pope, the first non- Italian in the role for nearly 500 years, had suffered under the twin tyrannies of first Nazism and then communism, to which his crowd-pulling brand of public ministries was anathema. Had the Pope died, would communism have vanished from the map of eastern Europe so easily? Was the Soviet KGB, fearful of a Polish pope, the real sponsor of Agca? John Paul visited Poland in June 1979, the year after his election, and made no attempt to hide his support for Solidarity, the independent trade union movement.

Later he was widely credited with helping to create the climate that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Soviets, watching their empire crumble — it finally gave way in 1991, 10 years after the shooting — had every reason to fear his ministry.

At the time an Italian judicial investigation into the assassination attempt and an inquiry launched by the CIA were inconclusive. In his testimony, Agca at first said that he had planned the shooting with accomplices, but then he recanted.

Later he helped to push the KGB theory by saying that it and other eastern European secret services had backed him. Then in 1982, a year after an Italian court had jailed him for life, he was more specific, accusing three Bulgarian nationals of helping to plot the Pope’s death.

They had paid him $1.2m, he said. The Bulgarians were later acquitted and Agca recanted his accusations.

He was extradited to Turkey in 2000, after serving almost 20 years in Italy for the shooting, and is now serving time in jail for separate crimes. In all that time he has never revealed more — despite being visited and forgiven by the Pope — and has since shown more of a nervous interest in the supernatural forces that helped his intended victim to survive.

Even now, however, the debate over the assassination attempt carries on.

A newly opened batch of files from the Stasi, the former East German secret police, has revealed that Agca, four years before he made his unlikely entrance on to the world stage in St Peter’s Square, trained at a guerrilla camp run by Carlos the Jackal, the international terrorist.

Carlos — a Venezuelan whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez — fought at first for the Palestinian cause in the late 1960s and 1970s, but went on to create a private army to wreak havoc in western Europe.

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