A Thessaloniki man was convicted yesterday in connection with the heroin death of a local teenager six years ago, in a case brought to the authorities’ attention by the sleuth work of the dead girl’s mother.

Savvas Hadziyiannidis was jailed for seven years for abandoning Paraskevi Fotiadou, 19, to her death when the girl became seriously ill after injecting heroin. Fotiadou was found dead in a Stavroupolis park in June 1998.

A second suspect, Christos Koufoudakis, was acquitted. Both had been charged with murder, after the girl’s mother, Eleni, 50, claimed that her daughter had been raped, murdered — with a heroin overdose — and robbed.

Frustrated by the lack of official interest in the case, Fotiadou had posed as a drug-addicted prostitute to infiltrate the Thessaloniki drug-dealing scene, and led police to the arrest of Hadziyiannidis and Koufoudakis.