Letter bomb was delivered by hand
Two officers assigned to the security team guarding Citizens’ Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis revealed that one of his political aides had brought by hand the letter bomb which killed his assistant on Thursday after it had been sent to the PASOK MPs political office. The officers, who were in the same room as Chrysochoidis’s assistant Giorgos Vassilakis moments before the blast, said that they saw the victim take an 11×17 inch (30×42 cm) envelope out of a sports bag that was used to transfer mail from the minister’s political office. The two policemen said that it appeared there was a small box in the envelope. They said Vassilakis had left the envelope on his desk while they were in the room and opened it just seconds after they had left. The two officers both recognized the remains of the envelope. Sources also revealed that Chrysochoidis’s aide had used the metro to carry the minister’s correspondence to his office and that he also stopped off at the National Glyptotheque in Goudi, not far from where the Citizens’ Protection Ministry is located. Police believe that the letter was sent to Chrysochodis, who is thought to be the intended target, from a post office in Kypseli. Officers have been examining CCTV footage from the particular branch in the hope of gaining clues about the identity of the perpetrators. The envelope had written on it that the sender was someone by the name of Christos Karavellas, which appears to have been a message from the assailants as this is the name of the former Siemens Hellas executive who is at the center of the cash-for-contracts scandal. Karavellas has been at large since last year. The use of Karavellas’s name suggests to authorities that a group calling itself Popular Will may be behind the attack. They had tried to explode a bomb outside Chrysochoidis’s political office in February and had set off a device outside the office of another suspect in the Siemens case last year.
