2 N17 suspects linked to heists
The 10th week of the November 17 terrorism trial will open on Monday with witnesses testifying in connection with the left-wing group’s last victim, British military attache Brigadier Stephen Saunders, who was assassinated in Athens in June 2000. During yesterday’s session in the Korydallos prison courtroom, where the trial of 19 suspected group members opened on March 3, prosecution witnesses identified two defendants as having been involved in three Athens bank robberies N17 is believed to have carried out between 1989 and 1998. The group’s alleged chief hit man, 45-year-old beekeeper Dimitris Koufodinas, was named by two witnesses as having taken part in the 1998 heist on the National Bank’s Pangrati branch and having been among a four-man N17 team spying out the land before the 1989 armed robbery of an Ergobank branch on Patission Street. A third witness said Christodoulos Xeros, a 45-year-old maker of musical instruments, took part in the 1990 Peristeri Ergobank robbery.
