Fans jailed for torturing rival
Seven soccer hooligans and a coach driver have been jailed for a total of over 62 years for abducting and torturing a rival team’s supporter whom they abandoned a few hours later naked and shorn on a highway. A Lamia court late on Thursday found the defendants guilty of abduction and grievous bodily harm for the May 1999 incident, which followed an Athens match between Olympiakos and Panathinaikos. All eight were led to a police holding center pending imprisonment, after the court refused to release them pending an appeal. The seven Olympiakos fans, who had come to Athens to attend the match with other team supporters from Volos, dragged Panathinaikos supporter Ioannis Iliopoulos into the coach at Kifissia and proceeded to beat him up. They then burned him with a cigarette lighter, stripped him, cut off his hair and photographed the result. Finally, at 3 a.m. and some 200km (125 miles) from Kifissia, they abandoned the victim by the road where a passing driver rescued him. The sentences ranged from six to nine-and-a-half years.
