Witness identifies Yotopoulos
Witnesses identified three of the 19 defendants as having been involved in attacks by the November 17 terrorist group during the mid-1980s in yesterday’s 12th day of the N17 trial. But Angeliki Davila, a clerk at the Ano Petralona bank that N17 robbed on Christmas Eve 1984, killing police guard Christos Matis, was only able to tentatively identify the group’s alleged chief hit man, 45-year-old beekeeper Dimitris Koufodinas, as having participated in the heist. «He had slanting eyes, which impressed me, he looked Chinese,» she said adding that while the man resembled Koufodinas – who is accused of having pulled the trigger – she could not be sure. This corroborates Tuesday’s testimony by the only witness who was able to identify any of the robbers. But the witness said Koufodinas had not killed Matis. In a brief interlude, the only female N17 suspect, Angeliki Sotiropoulou – Koufodinas’s wife – took issue with a lawyer’s attempt to involve her in the heist, for which she has not been charged. When a witness said a «plump» woman had been among the group of robbers, a lawyer representing the Matis family in a civil suit complained that the witness had not been shown pictures of Sotiropoulou during the investigation. «Do you find me fat or thin?» Sotiropoulou asked the witness, and, being assured that she was thin, added: «Good. I weighed 40 kilos then… I was 20 or 22 years old and looked like a child. Will that do?» The next witnesses testified on the February 21, 1985 central Athens killing of right-wing editor Nikolaos Momferatos and his driver, Panayiotis Roussetis. One identified alleged N17 mastermind Alexandros Yotopoulos as having been among the four people involved, while another said one of the two killers had been Christodoulos Xeros. The trial continues today.
