«If only he had taken society’s side and condemned violence. Lambrou said Xeros’s mind had functioned well while in the hospital. He regrets what he said while at Evangelismos.» He attributed Xeros’s change to the hard line take by Koufodinas after he gave himself up and claimed political responsibility for N17 but refused to provide any information. Prosecutor Christos Lambrou commented: «Savvas is in a difficult situation that’s why he says what he says. «I was tortured and I cannot accept this… I cannot recover from this,» he said. He claimed he had been given drugs and injected with «truth serum» at the hospital. It was not I but another Savvas who made these confessions – the one they had turned me into at that time,» Xeros said. «First, we will solve this problem and then I will testify. He repeated this call yesterday, returning to the court after a two-week walkout. He has since claimed he was «tortured» with mood-altering drugs to induce his confessions and has demanded that this testimony, as well as that to an investigating judge, be scrapped. Xeros’s confessions to police and a public prosecutor as he was recovering in Evangelismos Hospital last year set in motion a chain of events and arrests, leading to the trial which began in early March. Koufodinas, a beekeeper, is married to Xeros’s first wife, Angeliki Sotiropoulou, the only woman defendant. Xeros, a painter of religious icons, was the second defendant to take the witness stand, following Dimitris Koufodinas who presented the court with a manifesto but no information regarding the workings and membership of November 17. No one claimed responsibility for the bomb and police were investigating how it could have passed security checks at the very heart of the police force without help from the inside.Savvas Xeros, the self-confessed November 17 operative whose serious injury by a bomb he was carrying in Piraeus on Jgave police their first big break, told the court yesterday that it was not he but the confessions of «another Savvas» that had resulted in 19 suspects standing trial in Korydallos Prison. In May, Greece won a 110 billion euro ($147.6 billion) European Union and IMF loan in return for draconian austerity cuts.Ī close aide to Citizen Protection Minister Mihalis Chrysohoidis died in the blast of a booby-trapped package while the minister, who was in an office nearby, escaped unhurt. “The financial crisis is exacerbating the country’s tendency towards protests, violence and dissent,” he told Reuters. “All the implications are extremely negative for Greece.” “This is the last thing that Greece needed,” said George Kassimeris, a Greek expert on terrorism at Wolverhampton University in England. Thursday night’s blast, which killed one official, suggested that a tiny violent fringe with a bent for bombings remains active despite the arrests in April of six suspected members of its most militant group, the leftist Revolutionary Struggle. A bomb in a booby trapped package exploded at the Greek ministry in charge of police on Thursday, killing one of the minister's close aides, a police source said. A policeman stands guard after a bomb explosion at the Greek Public Order Ministry in Athens June 24, 2010.
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