And four ‘unknowns’
Senior KKE official Yiannis Zevgos went to Thessaloniki in March 1947 to represent the National Liberation Front (EAM) on the UN Balkan committee «on the murders and acts of violence by right-wing terrorists against leftists.» He was shot and killed on March 20 by Christos Vlachos, a 32-year-old meat vendor from Serres who gave his reason for the killing – according to the covering telegram of the police to the Public Order Ministry – as «his indignation that what he had suffered in Boules, imprisoned for six months by the tactics of the communist movement against the homeland.» The murderer was sentenced to two years in jail, was released and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. But, according to letters from two members of the group that killed Zevgos, Nikolaos Sidiropoulos and Haralambos Giaouridis, which were published in [the KKE newspaper] Rizospastis, the crime was planned in detail by the Military Police (ESA) and the second bureau of the Third Army Corps. The Organization for the Protection of the People’s Fighters (OPLA) carried out executions in terrorist fashion of nationalist goals and agents of the «royalist-fascists.» This is the unknown rebellion of the cities, a secret revolutionary organization of the KKE, charged with the mission of annihilating the Metaxas regime, and collaborators with the occupying forces who remained unpunished after the Varkiza agreement (demobilizing the communists’ military wing), and had continued acts of violence against democratic citizens. Its best-known victim was gendarme captain Dimitrios Koufitsas, deputy chief of the Thessaloniki security police and a reporter at the extraordinary court martial that had tried Leftists who had fought in the civil war. Two members of OPLA executed him on October 6, 1946 in Dikastiriou Square. Stefanos Veldimiris was shot by a policeman in Eptalofou Square for distributing EDA election material. Yiannis Halkidis, a member of the anti-dictatorship organization PAM, was murdered in cold blood on the night of September 5, 1967, in a hideout on Filellinon Street. The Greek Secret Service (KYP) officers who organized the killing (deputy gendarme captains Tatradakis and Diplas) were decorated by the leadership of the junta.
