not sure if there is anyone left here but I am posting this since we talked about it briefly if my memory serves me right...
Greek Police Catch Suspected Nov 17 Guerrilla Boss
Wed Jul 17, 7:07 PM ET
By Maria Petrakis
ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek police Wednesday detained a 60-year-old man who
they suspect may be a leader and possibly even a founder of the country's
most wanted urban guerrilla group, November 17, a police source said.
In what Greek media were reporting as an "historic day," the source told
Reuters the man had been seized by an anti-terrorism squad who landed by
helicopter on the island of Lipsi, 160 miles east of Athens, where he has a
holiday home.
The source said he was being questioned at Athens police headquarters and
documents, a typewriter and a computer had been seized from his main home
in the capital.
Earlier Wednesday police said ballistic tests had linked a gun used by
November 17 to the murders of seven people including a British military attache
and a Greek politician.
Named after the date of a bloody student uprising in 1973 during Greece's
1967-74 military rule, the radical leftist group has killed 23 people since 1975,
starting with the murder of Richard Welch, head of the American CIA ( news -
web sites)'s Athens bureau.
But until the past few weeks, police had failed to identify, let alone arrest, a
single member of a group that ranked with Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang and
the Italian Red Brigades.
HELICOPTER RAID
Witnesses on the isolated Lipsi island, with only 600 inhabitants, told Greek
television stations that the anti-terrorism squad of six had landed in a fire
department helicopter so as not to tip off the suspect.
They said they believed the suspect was a university professor with a French
wife, and that police had taken him into custody because they feared he was
about to take evidence off the island.
Since the manhunt for November 17 gripped Greece at the end of June, there
has been almost unanimous agreement in the media that its founder was a
Greek student radical in the 1960s who studied in Paris and received
revolutionary training in Cuba.
Hopes already were sky-high that the group's demise was near before the
suspect was taken into custody.
An earlier police statement said they had positively linked a .45 pistol
discovered in a central Athens hideout to the shooting of British military attache
Stephen Saunders and parliamentarian Pavlos Bakoyiannis, son-in-law of a
former Greek prime minister.
The hideouts also contained dozens of anti-tank rockets, remote-controlled
bombs and disguises such as fake police uniforms.
BOTCHED BOMBING
Police were led to the weapons cache after suspected November 17 member
Savvas Xiros was injured in a botched bombing at a Greek shipping company at
the end of June.
Xiros, 40, an icon painter and son of a Greek Orthodox priest, is being
questioned by authorities.
The police statement said three other people, including two of Xiros's brothers,
were also being questioned about their links to the group.
Saunders, the group's last victim, was killed in central Athens while driving to
work on June 8, 2000 when two men on a motorcycle came alongside his car
and shot him through the windows.
In a declaration, November 17 wrote that he had been targeted for his alleged
participation in the orchestration of NATO ( news - web sites)'s bombing of
Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict, a claim denied by his family.
Saunders's murder set off an outcry in Britain and led to British police joining
the investigation along with FBI ( news - web sites) agents already working on
the case.
With the Athens 2004 Olympics looming, Greek authorities have thrown all their
efforts into tracking down the group.
"All these incidents of the last 27 years...will be solved and they will be fully
solved," Greek government spokesman Christos Protopapas told reporters
Wednesday.
November 17 has also been linked to the murder of Greek police and
industrialists, attacks on Turkish diplomats, a rocket attack on the German
ambassador's residence, and bank robberies to finance its operations. |
