Lagadas manhunt nets quarry
Following a three-day manhunt by 500 officers, police in northern Greece yesterday caught a man suspected of shooting two brothers and abducting their sister, his former fiancee. A couple of hours earlier, officers had located Theodora Kirkinezi, 33, who had been abducted from the scene of the shooting in the Lagadas area northeast of Thessaloniki on Monday, in which her brother Dimitris, 29, met his death. Her other brother, Savvas, 31, escaped with non life-threatening injuries. Kirkinezi was found unhurt on a country road near the village of Lofiskos. She had been freed by her former fiance as she was hampering his movement through the woods, where the two spent the past three days. Around 1.25 p.m. in the same area, police arrested Yiannis Baltas, 33, who put up no resistance. The Kirkinezi siblings were ambushed in their car while traveling toward Lagadas. In the manhunt that ensued ground forces, backed by a helicopter equipped with a thermal camera, combed some 2,000 hectares. Baltas was finally betrayed by his footprints on the muddy ground.
