In Brief
ELA RELEASE
Member of extreme left-wing terror group to be freed from prison Angeletos Kanas, a convicted member of the extreme left-wing terrorist group Revolutionary Popular Struggle (ELA), had his 25-year jail sentence suspended yesterday by an appeals court in Athens. The court decided to set Kanas free for family reasons and because he had been cleared of taking part in a bombing campaign. Last July, Kanas, Christos Tsigaridas, Irini Athanassaki and Costas Agapiou were cleared of 10 bombings, mostly on police and US-linked targets. Judges yesterday asked Kanas to post 3,000 euros in bail and banned him from leaving Greece. BAD BLOOD Man charged over donation which infected two patients with HIV A prosecutor in Thessaloniki has charged a 38-year-old man with «conscious negligence» after he donated blood which led to a 16-year-old girl and a 76-year-old man becoming infected with HIV, the virus which causes AIDS, court sources said yesterday. The prosecutor decided the donor had not acted with malice aforethought but had breached the rules for donating blood when he filled in a form claiming he had not had frequent unprotected sex during the last 10 years, had not paid for sex in the previous 12 months and did not think there was a risk of him having HIV. TRUE FIND Artifacts seized from Getty curator Greek authorities have seized 17 ancient artifacts from a villa belonging to former Getty Museum curator Marion True, who is facing trial in Rome for conspiring to traffic in stolen antiquities. «They are works and objects from the Hellenistic and Roman eras, notably a marble figurine, architectural features from temples, capitals of columns and a Byzantine icon which has yet to be dated,» George Gligoris, head of the special unit against looting of antiquities, told AFP. The artifacts were found in the villa which True bought in 1995 on Paros, in the Cyclades Islands. (AFP) Phone tapping The lawyer representing the family of Costas Tsalikidis, the Vodafone engineer who allegedly committed suicide last year, revealed yesterday that someone had written to Themistoklis Sofos giving possible insight into the circumstances surrounding the technician’s death. Sofos said that this was the fourth such letter he had received but it was the first that had been signed. He did not reveal the name of the sender. Three killed Three people were killed and three others seriously injured when a car smashed head-on into a small truck on the national highway between Thessaloniki and Evzones, police said. A 32-year-old man, an Albanian national, and a 68-year-old man along with his 58-year-old wife were killed in the accident. Court collapse Lawyers and court officials in Arta, western Greece, will go on strike today in protest at the poor condition of the town’s courthouse, after one of the building’s walls collapsed yesterday. Nobody was injured in the incident, but lawyers told Kathimerini that they are annoyed that the court has not been moved from the building, which was built in 1900. The damage was caused by the construction of an apartment block next to the courthouse. Engineers deemed the court building to be safe after the accident. Murdered priest A 73-year-old priest found dead in his home in the yard of a church in Hania where he had preached for more than 20 years was suffocated by one or more attackers who also beat him, a coroner said yesterday. Panayiotis Vozinakis, whose hands and feet had been bound with plastic rope, died shortly after midnight on Sunday, according to a coroner who said the assailants had probably used a cushion. Police yesterday questioned a foreign national who did odd jobs for the cleric but later released him. Athens riot A 20-year-old woman was remanded in custody yesterday after testifying before a magistrate in connection with a riot by students in central Athens early on Saturday morning. The unnamed woman was charged with causing an explosion, possessing explosives, causing damage to private property, resisting arrest and burning the Greek flag. The magistrate’s ruling was met with derision by a group of the accused woman’s friends who attended court.
