In Brief
CELL PHONE DEALS
Lifer accused of running drug ring from Larissa jail A convict serving three life sentences for drug smuggling was named yesterday as the head of a ring importing quantities of heroin and marijuana from Bulgaria. Thessaloniki police said Angelos Terzoglou, 47, organized drug shipments over the phone from his Larissa prison cell. Three people – Olga Tsiobani, 36, Anastassios Tombazis, 24, and his 32-year-old cousin Dimitris – have been arrested in northern Greece as Terzoglou’s accomplices. Nikiforos/Toxotis Cyprus could downsize the annual autumn military exercises it conducts jointly with Greece, provided the Turkish Cypriots also show good intentions, Foreign Minister Ioannis Cassoulides said on Saturday. «We are prepared to curtail, depending on the intentions of the other side, any such activities in order to reduce tension at such a crucial time,» he said. Athens and Nicosia have reportedly come under pressure from the US to postpone the Nikiforos/Toxotis war games, scheduled to run from October 29 to November 3. The exercise was suspended last year due to the US attack on Afghanistan. Rhodes stabbings An Albanian national has been arrested on the island of Rhodes for the attempted stabbing murder of his estranged girlfriend’s brother, mother and cousin, police said yesterday. Evgeni Fama, 32, a manual worker, had allegedly threatened to burn alive – or, alternately, to poison – the family of 19-year-old Rhodes student Christofora Artiki, who left him four months ago. Police say he broke into the Artiki family home in the island capital on Saturday evening and stabbed Lazaros Artikis, 9, his mother Eleni, 52, and cousin Martha Skouli, 44. All three were taken to Rhodes hospital, where Eleni Artiki was in critical condition yesterday. Drowned corpse A badly decomposed male body found by a fisherman in the sea off the western Peloponnesian town of Kyparissia on Friday may belong to one of the illegal immigrants who drowned when a smuggling vessel sank in the area on September 3, the Merchant Marine Ministry said on Saturday. Three drowned bodies were found after the shipwreck, while another five people were listed missing. Thirty-six immigrants survived. A Greek retired sailor, Dimitrios Gerokounas, 63, was arrested on suspicion of having ferried them over from Turkey. AIDS A Cypriot cleric disqualified from running for Bishop of Morphou and suspended on suspicion of having AIDS said yesterday he would just like to be left in peace after reports said he was not ill after all. Greek Orthodox Archimandrite Pangratios, who withdrew to a remote monastic cell, told journalists he was quite happy living «close to nature and the Blessed Virgin.» On Saturday, the man who got the Morphou see, Bishop Neophytos, said he would stand down were Pangratios proven a healthy man.
