Word: sofia
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According to published reports of his confession to Italian Judge Ilario Martella last year, Agca contended that during a seven-week stay in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in 1980, he was offered $1.5 million to kill the Pope. The man Agca said made the proposition is Bekir Çelenk, a shadowy Turkish businessman whose dealings often brought him to Bulgaria. Çelenk last week again denied that he had ever met Agca, but he admitted that the two had stayed at the same Sofia hotel at the same time in July...
...though the style was fearless, the conditions were fearful, and Spain's King Juan Carlos, 45, an expert skier, took a wild tumble that cracked his pelvis. Taken by stretcher to a hospital in the nearby Swiss town of Saanen, Juan Carlos was flown with his wife, Queen Sofia, to Madrid the next day aboard the royal DC-8. Ordered immobilized by his doctors for at least a month, the King will be fulfilling his duties from...
Stung by the speculation, Bulgaria for the first time has explicitly denied involvement. At an unusual Sofia press conference, the director of Bulgaria's state news agency charged the West with a frame-up "aimed at influencing the sentiments of millions of Catholics." The Soviet news agency TASS rejected "absurd insinuations" linking Moscow to the plot. Even many Western analysts, while convinced that the Soviets often act through Bulgarian proxies, believe the assassination attempt was too sloppy to have been directed by the KGB. Says a West German intelligence official: "I cannot believe that the KGB would do something...
Exactly what role Antonov may have played in the conspiracy is not clear. Nor is much known about Antonov himself, beyond the fact that he had worked in Rome for four or five years, and left his family at home in Sofia. His job would have given him easy access to passenger planes at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport, freeing him from some of the limitations of immigration and customs controls. According to some reports, he is suspected of having provided Agca with information, money and a hotel room at the time of the shooting, and may even...
...terrorist roots back to his native Turkey, where he had rubbed shoulders with extremists of both right and left. In July 1979 Agca pleaded guilty to the murder of moderate Turkish Journalist Abdi Ipekci; he escaped from prison five months later. In July 1980 Agca appeared in Sofia, Bulgaria. According to NBC, he spent seven weeks in the best hotels there, received a counterfeit Turkish passport and mingled with members of the Turkish Mafia, which has long run a thriving drugs-for-guns trade with the cooperation of Bulgaria's hard-line Communist regime. It was in Bulgaria, Kalb...