The members of the terrorist group Sect of Revolutionaries, which claimed last week’s murder of an anti-terrorist officer, see themselves as the successors of the most extreme elements of the Revolutionary Popular Struggle (ELA), one of the largest urban guerrilla groups ever to operate in Greece, according to officers who have been analyzing a proclamation published in Ta Nea newspaper yesterday.

Sources told Kathimerini yesterday that references to fringe groups, which experts believe made up the most extreme wing of ELA, suggest that the members of the Sect of Revolutionaries believe they are continuing ELA’s work.

“We do not seek their historical justification but to continue and surpass what they achieved,” the proclamation read.

ELA was formed in 1971 in opposition to the military junta but carried on committing terrorist acts until 1995.

Nektarios Savvas, the officer killed last week, was guarding a female witness in the appeals hearing of convicted members of the group. The proclamation warned that if she continued to give evidence or if “she continues with her delusions and lies,” as the proclamation put it, the terrorists would “pull out her tongue at the root.”

The proclamation threatened the same action against anyone else testifying in the case and said that it would treat any witnesses to last week’s shooting as targets.

Sources said that officers believe the members of the Sect of Revolutionaries are Exarchia-based anarchists who have swapped Molotov cocktails for guns. In their proclamation, they make no attempt to justify their actions politically, instead presenting terrorism as an end in itself. “We are realists and we are happy that we do not have to defend the vision and hope for a better world,” they said in their message.