More terror arrests due
Police are expected to be looking to arrest up to six more people who are suspected of being members of the Revolutionary Struggle terrorist group, sources said yesterday, as more details emerged about the contacts between the six alleged members that have already been caught. Forensic officers are in a race against time to process all the evidence that has been collected from various homes in Attica that were used by the suspects already apprehended. They are hoping that they will be able to gather enough evidence to warrant further arrests and to discover where the weapons and explosives used by Revolutionary Struggle might be hidden. Sources said that four suspects have been identified through fingerprints, some of which where found at the home of another suspect, Lambros Fountas, whose shooting last month proved a turning point in the police’s investigation into the urban guerrilla group, which has been active since 2003. These four also exchanged phone calls with the group’s alleged mastermind, Nikos Maziotis. The 39-year-old Maziotis had been known to police since the late 1990s. He was sentenced to 15 years in jail in 1999 for having planted a bomb outside the Development Ministry two years earlier. The bomb did not go off and Maziotis’s fingerprint was found on the device. He admitted in court to planting the bomb. On appeal, his sentence was reduced to five years but he served just over three before being released. After recovering Fountas’s phone records, police placed several of the suspects under surveillance at the beginning of April. Police said that the alleged terrorists took care to avoid detection, using public pay phones to make calls where possible and driving in such a manner as to make it difficult for officers to follow without being noticed. However, in the four days leading up to their arrests on Sunday, the suspects appeared to have become careless, as they were closely monitored by police, who witnessed them meeting in one of their safe houses in Nea Ionia, northern Athens, and subsequently followed one of the six, Vangelis Stathopoulos, to a remote spot on Mount Hymettus where he is believed to have practiced shooting.
