This handout photo grabed from a video made and released by ADNKRONOS on December 27, 2014 shows Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish former extremist who attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, holding a wreath of flowers on St. Peter's square in The Vatican. (Ho/AFP/Getty Images)

The man who tried to kill Pope John Paul II more than 33 years ago showed up at the Vatican on Saturday to put white roses on the pontiff’s tomb. Mehmet Ali Agca said he wanted to meet Pope Francis.

Agca left John Paul critically injured after firing several shots in the assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981. The pope, who died in April 2005, forgave Agca, once a member of the far-right Turkish group the Grey Wolves, and visited him in 1983 at the prison in Rome where he was incarcerated.

Agca called the Italian daily la Repubblica on Saturday to announce he had arrived in the Vatican, exactly 31 years after the prison visit by John Paul, who was canonized in April.

The Rev. Ciro Benedettini, the Vatican’s deputy spokesman, said Agca stood for a few moments in silent meditation over the tomb in St. Peter’s Basilica before he left two bunches of white roses.

As for meeting Francis, the Vatican on Saturday gave a cool response.

In this Dec. 27, 1983 file photo provided by Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, Pope John Paul II, left, meets Mehmet Ali Agca, in Agca's prison cell in Rome. (AP)

“He has put his flowers on John Paul’s tomb; I think that is enough,” the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, told la Repubblica.

When Agca, a Turk, was apprehended after shooting the pontiff, he said he acted alone. Later he suggested that Bulgaria and the Soviet secret services masterminded the attack on John Paul, whose championing of the Polish Solidarity labor movement alarmed Moscow.

At John Paul’s urging, Agca, now 56, was pardoned by Italy in 2000.

He was extradited to Turkey, where he was imprisoned for the 1979 murder of a journalist and other crimes. He was released in 2010.