| ... which is all very nice, except that he also offered to sprout wings and fly to the moon... |
Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II, once volunteered to go to Afghanistan to kill or capture Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden as a gesture to the United States, a newspaper report said Tuesday. The mass-circulation Hurriyet published excerpts from letters Agca wrote from prison over the past few years before his release last week after a quarter of a century behind bars in Italy and Turkey. In a letter dated September 1, 2000, addressed to the then head of Turkish intelligence, Agca wrote of U.S. help to Turkey in capturing Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan in Kenya the previous year. "America gave us Ocalan as a gift. Let's give them bin Laden in return," wrote Agca, then jailed in Istanbul, one year before the September 11 attacks in the U.S., Hurriyet reported. "I'm ready to go on my own to Afghanistan, penetrate bin Laden's organization and hand him over to America, dead or alive," he wrote. "I really hate terrorism. If I become a national hero in America, this will be to the great benefit of the Turkish nation and the Turkish state," he wrote.
Many consider Agca, 48, to be deranged, while others believe he is a sly operator playing the madman. He has pronounced himself as the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and Hurriyet said some of his letters were signed "The Messiah." In another letter, he wrote that he refused a Vatican offer of $50 million and the title of cardinal to convert to Catholicism. "I'd rather be a monkey in Africa than a king at the Vatican," he reportedly wrote.