‘November 17 is over,’ Koufodinas writes from Athens prison
As police intensified the hunt for Christodoulos Xeros, the November 17 gunman who disappeared earlier this month while on a prison furlough, another N17 guerrilla serving life sentence at an Athens prison said that the organization cannot be resurrected.
In a letter to Efimerida ton Syntakton daily published on Thursday, Dimitris Koufondinas also attacked members of the disbanded terrorist group who denied their role or helped the authorities to dismantle N17 during the police crackdown in 2002.
“As I have said before, N17’s circle of life has closed. I said it in 2002, when I was defending the honor of the organization and the revolutionary values that were belittled by the confessions and hurt by the great silence. That is when N17 came to an end,” Koufodinas wrote in the letter sent from the high-security prison in southeastern Athens.
“No one has the right to use and usurp the name and history of N17, even less claim to be its continuation. Or we risk hearing once more Marx’s famous saying about history being repeated as a farce,” he wrote.
On Monday, Xeros posted a video and a letter on the Internet heralding his return to terrorism and appealing to members of leftist and anarchist guerrilla groups to unite in armed action in protest against ongoing austerity in Greece.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday authorities announced a 4-million-euro reward to anyone providing information leading to the arrest of Xeros as well as another two convicted members of Revolutionary Struggle and the unknown killers of two members of the neofascist Golden Dawn. Nikos Maziotis and Panagiota Roupa have remained unaccounted for since July 2012, when they were released after serving the maximum of 18 months in pretrial custody.
