A group of 13 civil society organisations has written to Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov asking him to confer a high state honour on Roumyana Ougurchinska, a Bulgarian-born French journalist, whose 2007 book on the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II blamed Turkish ultra-nationalist organisation The Grey Wolves and shadowy forces linked to Western intelligence.
 
The group announced the request at a news conference in Sofia on June 24 2009, Bulgarian news agency BTA said.
 
On May 13 1981, John Paul II was seriously wounded in a shooting in St Peter’s Square at the Vatican. A Turkish citizen, Mehmet Ali Agca, was found guilty of the shooting. At the time and subsequently, reports linked Bulgarian and Soviet secret services to the assassination attempt.
 
Frequently mentioned in connection with the case was Sergei Antonov, a representative in Rome at the time for Bulgaria’s Balkan Airlines.
 
During a 2002 visit to Bulgaria, John Paul II said that he did not believe that Bulgaria had been involved in the attempt to kill him.
 
Ourgurchinska (46) has lived in France most of her life and has authored two other books and numerous articles for French publications.
 
Her book outlined the theory that Agca was not the only gunman who fired on John Paul II. There was at least one more, from the Grey Wolves organisation to which Agca belonged. An ultra-nationalist organisation, Grey Wolves was against everything it saw as communist, supposedly including a Pope who came from what was then a country in the Soviet bloc.
 
The book reports alleged links between the Grey Wolves and operations set up by the US Central Intelligence Agency that would have acted covertly in countries in the event of a Soviet takeover. One of these "stay behind" operations was Operation Gladio, which had an Italian unit.
 
For the book, the author travelled to Rome, Sofia, Paris, Frankfurt, Istanbul and Washington, including for meetings with intelligence sources. A former CIA staffer reportedly told her that the agency had been aware that Bulgaria was not involved in the plot to murder John Paul II.