Police profile ‘Sect’ as nihilists
As police continued to search for leads to the killers of journalist Sokratis Giolias, believed to be the Sect of Revolutionaries, a report by the force’s counterterrorism unit notes that the group’s inspiration is a dead Russian nihilist revolutionary and that its goals are not to make a political statement but to fuel insurrection. According to the report, compiled last summer and seen by Kathimerini, Sect of Revolutionaries is «the first Greek organization that is completely nihilist, its key aims being chaos and destruction.» This stance is believed to have been inspired by Sergey Nechayev, a Russian revolutionary associated with the Nihilist movement and known for his support of revolution by all means, including violence.The author of the group’s proclamations is believed to be aged over 40 and to hail from an upper-middle-class background. An extract of the report reads: «This person adopted terrorism as a way of reacting to society which, in his view, has hit rock bottom.» As for the other members of the group, police believe they fall into two camps: radicalized criminals and extremist anti-establishment protesters. Police have been comparing evidence taken from the scene of Giolias’s shooting – including the cartridge casings of 16 bullets that have been linked to weapons used by Sect of Revolutionaries – with clues from the scenes of other attacks claimed by the organization. The group emerged in February last year with two bloodless attacks – one on a police station and one on a private television station – followed by the slaying of a policeman in June of that year. In a related development, the managers of the news blog Troktiko, to which Giolias had contributed, said they had suspended the operation of the online journal.
