Dora and family testify to loss of Bakoyiannis
The most dramatic moments in the ongoing trial of the alleged members of the November 17 terrorist organization were when Athens Mayor Dora Bakoyianni and her children Costas and Alexia testified to what happened when Pavlos Bakoyiannis, her husband and their father, was murdered at the entrance to his office. «He wished you good morning when he saw you there, and you shot him. And you gave him the death blow when he had been felled to his knees, gazing at you in wonderment, he who never knew fear, who never carried a weapon; not even his driver or co-driver carried weapons.» «What’s bothering you?» asked Costas, who was 11 when his father was murdered, turning to defendant Dimitris Koufodinas. «Is it the fact that you haven’t got a. 45 in your hand?» And Alexia, who was 13 at the time, said: «We went on the school bus in the morning and when we came home we had no father… My father proclaimed national reconciliation, he built a bridge between the right and the left, so you would have some way of surviving, but you want to make society to your measure.» In moderate, meaningful language, business magnate and retired Vice Admiral Vardis Vardinoyiannis, the personification of Cretan manliness and bravery, described to the jury what happened that morning in Nea Erythraia when three rockets struck his armored car. «I got out to catch them, but they had gone. I brought in outsiders and investigated for two years, but to no avail. I’m unlucky I didn’t catch them; they’re lucky I didn’t.» This statement, and another laconic comment, «We Cretans have weapons, but we don’t use them,» dumbfounded the defendants, who did not utter a word. Defendant Savvas Xeros scowled at some ordinary people who came to the trial as witnesses, terrifying them; one woman had to be taken to Nikaia hospital.
