EVER since Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, shot the late Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981 in St Peter’s Square in Rome, investigators have tried to solve one of the 20th century’s greatest mysteries: did Agca act alone or was he obeying communist orders? This week an Italian parliamentary commission will officially conclude that Agca was part of a huge conspiracy masterminded by the GRU, the Soviet military secret service, on the orders of the politburo and Leonid Brezhnev, general secretary of the Communist party.

The findings are already being considered by a Rome prosecutor who may relaunch his long-stalled investigation into the assassination attempt.

The report of the Rome parliament’s Mitrokhin commission deals with both the run-up to the shooting and its aftermath. It was originally set up to study the Soviet penetration of Italy which was revealed in documents spirited out of Moscow by Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB archivist who defected in 1992.

The commission decided to focus on the attack after John Paul wrote in his book Memory and Identity: Conversations between Millenniums: “Someone else planned it, someone else commissioned it.” For the first time he indirectly blamed the Soviet Union, referring to it as “the last dictatorship of the century”.

Paolo Guzzanti, the commission’s president, said last week that it had come to a “categorical conclusion”. For this the commission, which studied the files of Italian judicial inquiries and questioned investigating magistrates, has relied in part on disclosures made by Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière, a French anti-terrorist specialist.

“Bruguière showed us the evidence, based on several testimonies and documents, that the GRU received the order to murder the Pope directly from the politburo and probably from Brezhnev himself. This was not less than two months before the shooting,” said Guzzanti, a senator from the centre-right.

“We had thought it was the KGB, but Bruguière was very precise. He found that the GRU wanted to compromise its rival. And so with one blow the GRU would eliminate the Pope and discredit the KGB because everyone would think the KGB did it,” he said.

Bruguière’s sources, Guzzanti said, included Abu Nidal, the late Palestinian terrorist. They may also have included Carlos the Jackal, the jailed Venezuelan terrorist whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez. Bruguière has been investigating him for 20 years. “We know Carlos the Jackal trained in the same places as Agca, in Syria and Sudan,” Guzzanti said.

Bruguière told the commission that he would testify fully in Rome about his conclusions but only after he had completed his work on Carlos.

Of the Soviet motive for trying to assassinate the spiritual leader of 1 billion Catholics worldwide, the report says: “The remote and direct cause of the shooting is military.” Only this “justifies the enormity of the efforts and the risk involved in eliminating the Polish Pope who kept Poland in a state of permanent revolution”.

According to Guzzanti, the key evidence of a link between Agca and Soviet intelligence was a photograph taken at the time of the shooting. It shows both Agca and, not far from him, a man wearing a moustache and large spectacles.

“This photograph is the smoking gun. We have carried out two analyses of the picture and computer technology proves that the man with a moustache is Sergei Antonov, a Bulgarian. And Bulgarian agents carried out the shooting on Soviet orders,” Guzzanti said.

Antonov, then head of the Balkan Air office in Rome, was originally implicated by Agca, who identified him from photographs. Agca painted an accurate portrait of Antonov: he collected miniature liqueur bottles, loved flowers and pop music and smoked Havana cigars. Antonov denied knowing Agca.

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