Tension at Golden Dawn appeal hearing
The hearing of appeals by dozens of members of the now-defunct neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party convicted over the 2013 murder of leftist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, among other crimes, continued on Friday in a tense session that became even more stormy when the lawyer of the only defendant in the courtroom gave a Nazi salute.
Lawyer Kostas Plevris made the gesture during an argument with Fyssas’ mother, Magda, while defending Yiannis Lagos, a former member of the European Parliament and among the party’s highest echelons, who had requested that the trial be televised and is seeking to portray himself as a political prisoner.
Magda Fyssa, who was the key witness in Friday’s session, spoke at length of the events that transpired on the night her son was stabbed to death by GD member Giorgos Roupakias.
Roupakias “dealt three professional hits. Two in the heart and one in the thigh, in the aorta. The person who did this was trained,” she said, pointing to evidence that Roupakias was not acting on his own initiative.
Fyssas’ murder, on September 18, 2013, led to the investigation of Golden Dawn and its classification as a criminal organization. The first trial of Fyssas’ murderer and the Golden Dawn leadership lasted five and a half years, ending in September 2020 with lengthy sentences handed down.
