The suspects in the alleged blackmail of former Culture Ministry general secretary Christos Zachopoulos were yesterday handed the case file of the investigation being carried out by magistrates, as details of witness statement were made public.

The documents show that the head of Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis’s press office, Yiannis Andrianos, told magistrates that journalist and Proto Thema co-owner Themos Anastasiadis gave him last December a DVD showing Zachopoulos having sex with his assistant.

Anastasiadis argued his innocence and said that he was being targeted by interests that were threatening the independence of his newspaper. He told magistrate Dimitris Economou that several other publishers and crooked politicians had ganged up to destroy Proto Thema.

He also claimed that his bitter public falling out with one of the paper’s co-owners, journalist Makis Triantafyllopoulos, had occurred because his former colleague was adopting a pro-government stance that Anastasiadis could not accept.

He also denied that there was any link between some 5 million euros that suddenly appeared in his bank account last year and the alleged blackmail of Zachopoulos or any other criminal activity.

In his testimony, Triantafyllopoulos told the magistrate that whoever gave the DVD to the government was responsible for Zachopoulos’s attempted suicide as it brought the ex-public official under immense pressure.

Zachopoulos attempted to kill himself by jumping off his fourth-floor balcony two days after resigning last December.