'Two or three weeks ago Ali Agca's lawyer told officials at the Polish consulate in Ankara his client intends to ask for Polish citizenship. He said he would made a formal request next Wednesday or Thursday,' Polish foreign ministry spokesman Piotr Paszkowski said on Friday.

'He did not explain the motivation behind his client's decision,' Mr Paszkowski added.

Should any such request be received, it would be processed according to regular procedures, passing from the consulate to the Polish president's chancellery via immigration authorities.

'Ultimately the decision lies with the president,' Mr Paszkowski said, adding that Agca's request would certainly come up against several legal hurdles.

'To gain Polish citizenship one must have lived in Poland for at least five years,' he explains.

Meeting with him in his prison cell in 1983, Pope John Paul II forgave Ali Agca for the failed assassination attempt which took place in St Peter's Square on May 13, 1981.

After having spent 19 years in an Italian prison, the one-time ultra-nationalist Turkish militant Agca was turned over to Turkish authorities in 2000 to serve time for other crimes. At home, Agca had been convicted for the 1979 assassination of a Turkish journalist and a 1970s bank robbery.

In June 2006, Poland's Institute for National Remembrance (IPN), responsible for investigating Nazi and communist-era crimes, launched an investigation into whether communist security services had played a role in the attempted assassination of the Polish pope. -- AFP