Ten months in jail for shepherd due to error
A 58-year-old Bulgarian shepherd who came to Greece looking for work has just been released from prison, it was revealed yesterday, after spending 10 months in custody because he was mistaken for a major cigarette smuggler. A court in Thessaloniki decided on Tuesday to end Georgi Jankov’s pretrial detention after establishing that he simply shared the same name as one of the aliases used by a wanted criminal. Jankov was penniless when he arrived in Thessaloniki last November. On his first three days in the city, he slept on the streets and begged for food. He was picked up by police after an argument with two other Bulgarians as the three men waited in line for food at a church mess. When police ran his name through their system, it matched that of a suspect wanted for forgery, being a member of a gang and laundering more than 400,000 euros.
