Police identify second suspect linked to writer’s murder
Police investigating the murder last month of author Menis Koumandareas Wednesday made public the name and photograph of a second Romanian national implicated in the 83-year-old’s killing as additional details about the attack became known.
Police said Cosmin Gaitan, 29, has been linked to Koumandareas’s murder on December 5 along with a 26-year-old Romanian, identified only as Stefan, who was arrested a few hours after the killing.
Closed-circuit television cameras showed both men entering the apartment block in Kypseli where the writer lived on the afternoon of December 5 and leaving the building shortly after 11 p.m. on the same day, police sources said. The men’s fingerprints were also found at the entrance of the apartment building and inside Koumandareas’s apartment, according to police who said a search had traced signals from the 26-year-old’s cell phone in the area of Kypseli on the night of the murder.
The head of Attica’s security police, Panagiotis Stathis, revealed meanwhile that the 26-year-old knew that Koumandareas had recently earned 150,000 euros from a property sale. Two months before his death, the writer told friends that he had been attacked by two assailants close to his apartment, identifying the 26-year-old as one of the attackers, Stathis told a press conference.
