Reporters face ‘N17’ charges
Two journalists are facing charges related to the crime of «harboring a criminal» after the Athens prosecutor ruled that last summer the two had leaked depositions taken during the investigation into the November 17 case. The prosecution claims that information allegedly printed by Panayiotis Stathis of the newspaper Eleftherotypia and Despina Brousali of To Vima, «thwarted the arrest of a suspect referred to in the testimony,» although sections of the testimony were printed in all the media after members of the gang began to be arrested early last July. At the November 17 trial yesterday, psychiatrist Katerina Matsa and two friends of defendant Angeliki Sotiropoulou claimed she had been «demonized» by the press. Meanwhile, commenting on testimony regarding explosives used by the group, defendant Dimitris Koufodinas, allegedly the gang’s operations chief, said the explosives had been «tested hundreds of times» so as to avoid mistakes.
