Call for N17 killers to get life
The November 17 terrorists who assassinated Britain’s military attache in Greece over two years ago should be denied their loved ones’ company for the rest of their lives, Brig. Stephen Saunders’s widow told a press conference in Athens yesterday. «If these people are guilty, I just think I would like to see them go to prison, to be denied the company of their loved ones,» Heather Saunders said, at a conference in the British Embassy. «I want them to be taken away from their families and denied what we have been denied. (I want them to receive) a life sentence.» Saunders, killed in his traffic-locked car on Kifissias Avenue in June 2000, was the left-wing terrorist group’s 23rd victim in a series of shootings and bomb attacks that started in 1975. His widow testified before an examining magistrate on Thursday regarding Saunders’s killing, and requested that she be represented as a civil plaintiff when her husband’s alleged assassins are brought to trial. But she said yesterday she would not be seeking financial compensation. «If there is any compensation, it should go perhaps to those victims who are less wealthy,» she said. And she expressed gratitude to the Greek police for their work in catching 17 suspected group members this summer, as did British Ambassador David Madden. «Greece has made enormous strides in the fight against terrorism,» Madden told the press conference. Meanwhile, sources close to the N17 investigation said yesterday that some of the forensic material found in the group’s two Athens safe houses discovered in the summer matched two of the DNA samples taken from all but one of the suspects. Out of the five hairs tested, three were found to belong to Savvas Xeros, one to his brother Vassilis and the fifth to an unknown woman.
