In Brief
Countryside killings
Farmer and two sons charged as police reveal extent of beatings A prosecutor in Trikala, central Greece, yesterday charged a 67-year-old farmer and his two sons, aged 27 and 30, with the premeditated murder of an elderly couple near the town of Kalabaka. Eleftherios Fassoulas, 67, and his 70-year-old wife Eleni were found dead on Friday night. The unnamed suspects allegedly killed the couple because of a dispute between the families over their animals’ grazing rights. Trikala Police Chief Christos Bouras told Kathimerini that the attackers used five different objects, including an ax, to beat the couple to death. SPARTAN SUCCESS ‘300’ film breaks box-office record The Battle of Thermopylae epic «300» broke Greek box-office records during its opening weekend, film distributors said yesterday. More than 325,000 people saw the film, based on Frank Miller’s comic book series, despite the poor reviews it has received in Greece. The previous Thursday-to-Sunday opening record for a film was «Pirates of The Caribbean II» with 220,000 ticket sales, according to Agence France-Presse. Car bomb Cypriot police said yesterday that drug dealers probably murdered a 42-year-old man who was killed in Limassol on Sunday by a car bomb. Officer said that Athanassios Tsapelas, a Bulgarian national, had served time in jail in Greece for drug offenses. Tsapelas had been convicted along with a Cypriot man who was murdered last summer, police said. Tsapelas’s wife was injured in the explosion and was still not well enough to talk to police yesterday. Smuggler sentenced A Turkish man was sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined -37,500 by an Athens court yesterday for smuggling illegal immigrants into the country. Serafetin Aydin was arrested on Saturday on the eastern Aegean island of Samos where 16 immigrants from Lebanon and Afghanistan have also been found in the last 24 hours. Repeat offender A 29-year-old man who recently finished serving a prison sentence for stealing equipment from riot police in 2005 has been arrested again in connection with a robbery at a rock concert two years ago. Panayiotis Aspiotis is accused of being part of a gang that stole some -7,000 from the ticket office at the Rockwave Festival in Malakassa, north of Athens, in June 2005.
