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His greatest coup was the kidnapping of 11 government ministers at a meeting of the Opec oil-producing nations in Vienna in 1975. He is now serving a life sentence in France for murdering two counter-espionage officers and an associate.

Shortly after the Vienna kidnappings, Carlos set up a network called Separat. It is this organisation that taught Agca, according to the Stasi files.

An Italian parliamentary commission which has studied the Stasi evidence has said it suggests that Agca’s instructors at the camp included East Germans and Bulgarians. This again bolsters the theory that the KGB could have been behind the plot, because Separat is known to have functioned partly at the behest of the Soviet and East German secret services.

All the meetings at which terrorism attacks were planned were held in the presence of officers of the KGB and the Stasi, Senator Paolo Guzzanti, chairman of the Italian commission, said recently.

At the camp, Agca was given his first instruction in handling weapons and explosives. Two years later, in 1979, he carried out his first contract killing, the murder of Abdi Ipekci, editor of Milliyet, the Turkish newspaper. Agca was arrested and sentenced to death, but escaped wearing an army uniform after six months in jail.

Last week the Bulgarian government pledged to hand over to the Rome commission a separate batch of Stasi files, which Guzzanti said should provide more details on the interplay between the KGB, the Bulgarian secret service and the Stasi in the planning, execution and aftermath of the assassination attempt in St Peter’s Square. Bulgaria obtained the files from Germany in 2002, but until now has refused to publish them.

“These documents confirm that the order came from Moscow and that the Bulgarians had a criminal role, with the Stasi involved in launching a disinformation campaign afterwards,” Guzzanti said.

Conspiracy breeds conspiracy, however, and the Bulgarians have dismissed the fresh interest in the Agca case as little more than a crude attempt to derail the country’s bid for membership of the European Union.

“This topic is coming up now not only because of the Pope’s condition, but also perhaps because on April 25 Bulgaria will sign the treaty to join the European Union. Every time something important is about to happen, insinuations come out,” Dimitar Tsonev, a government spokesman, said.

That is unlikely to temper the mood in Italy. Ferdinando Imposimato, the judge who led the investigation into the case until 1985, has called on the judicial authorities to reopen the investigation into the papal shooting, saying that the new Stasi evidence tallies with his own conclusions.

“I have no doubt that the Soviets, the Bulgarians and the East Germans were involved in the attack,” he said. “We need to look for more documents rather than question Agca, because he has been threatened repeatedly by Bulgarian and other officials and he won’t talk.”

The Pope has always distanced himself from the theories, saying he never believed that Agca was sponsored by the Bulgarians. But in his latest book Memory and Identity — in which he spends 11 compelling pages describing the attack — he added fuel to the fire by suggesting that Agca must have been backed by an outside interest.

“Someone else masterminded it and someone else commissioned it,” he wrote of the brush with death that only strengthened his resolve and convinced Catholics around the world that he was the greatest Pope of the modern era.

Additional reporting: Elena Yoncheva, Sofia

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