The Pope reveals that in 2021 he was almost assassinated twice, but the British secret services thwarted both attacks

Pope Francis has revealed that in his trip to Iraq in March 2021, the first by a pontiff to that country, two attempted attacks were preventedin an excerpt from his autobiography advanced this Tuesday before its publication in January.

“That trip was advised against me by everyone (…) But I wanted to go to the end, I felt I had to. I said, almost familiarly, that I needed to go see our grandfather Abraham, the common ancestor of Jews, Christians and Muslims” , he confesses in his autobiography Sperawhich will be published next January 14.

In the part about his historic trip to Iraq, anticipated by the newspaper Il Corriere della Serathe Argentine pontiff recalls that The country was still suffering the ravages of the pandemic and continued “evidencing very high security risks“for the attacks.

So much so that the Vatican Gendarmerie received a notice from the British secret services on two alleged attack plans during his apostolic journey.

“Even after all that devastation, the wind of hatred did not stop. I was notified as soon as we landed in Baghdad the day before. The police had alerted the Vatican Gendarmerie about information received from the English secret services: a woman loaded with explosivesa young suicide bomber, He was heading to Mosul to blow himself up. and one van had also left at full speed with the same intention,” he recalls.

In any case, the apostolic trip took place and, among other milestones, the Pope visited the holy city of Shiite Islam, Najafand met with its highest authority, Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, to advocate for dialogue between religions.

“That meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani had been prepared by the Holy See for decades, without any of my predecessors managing to complete it,” Francis acknowledges.

Meanwhile, the pontiff continued to monitor the two alleged attackers about whom he had been warned upon his arrival in Iraq.

“When the next day I asked the Gendarmerie what knew about the two attackersthe commander answered me laconically ‘they are no longer there’. The Iraqi police had intercepted them and exploded them. This also affected me a lot, this was also a poisoned fruit of the war,” he recalls.