The truth about Pope’s knife attack

It has long been known that the last Pope, John Paul II (pictured), was fortunate enough to survive an assassination attempt by a knife-wielding Roman Catholic priest in 1982, just one year after he was shot in St Peter's Square by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca. However, a new documentary reveals that, contrary to the Vatican's claim at the time that he was unhurt, he was in fact badly wounded.

The revelation appears in Testimony, a film based on the memoirs of one of the pope's closest aides, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz. The attack occurred on May 12, 1982 while the pope was visiting the shrine city of Fatima in Portugal. Dziwisz says: "I can now reveal that the Holy Father was wounded. When we got back to the room (in the Fatima sanctuary complex) there was blood." The Pope carried on with the trip without disclosing his wound. After his arrest, Krohn served several years in a Portuguese prison before being expelled from the country.

The documentary, which is narrated by the British actor Michael York, includes video of Pope John Paul’s last public appearance from his window overlooking St Peter's Square, when, debilitated by Parkinson's disease, he did not manage to pronounce any words. Dziwisz says that when the Pope, who had undergone a tracheotomy to help him breathe, was wheeled back into his apartments, he regained some strength and managed to whisper: "If I can't speak any more, it's time for me to go". He died several days later on April 2, 2005, aged 84.