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The Attack
Thursday June 8, 2000 was
just another day for Brigadier Stephen Saunders, 53, the British military attaché in Athens, as he drove to work through the congested city traffic at 7:48 am.
Saunders, who was three
years from retirement, was planning to move back to England to an old mill
house in Dorset with his wife, Heather and his two teenage daughters. His career had been
long, dangerous and distinguished; he had served as a soldier in Northern Ireland,
Australia, Papua New Guinea
and Kuwait and had been appointed Britain’s
defence attaché in Athens in 1999.
But Thursday June 8 was
the day that the members of the Greek terrorist group November 17 had decided that Saunders would die. The assassin was Savas
Xiros, 37, a religious icon painter. He checked his gun and climbed onto the pillion of a motorbike which started to weave
its way through the congested traffic towards Saunders’ white Rover 300. The .45 had a lethal history; it had previously
been used by N17 to kill four other people in separate terrorist attacks.
As the assassin pulled
alongside Saunders he leaned down, pointed his gun through the open window and squeezed the trigger four times. Saunders was
a sitting duck; with nowhere to run and no cover, every bullet found its target. He was hit in the shoulder, chest and
head. While frantic witnesses called for help, the assassins vanished into the rush-hour traffic.
Despite
the congestion, an ambulance was on the scene in minutes. The Brigadier, still alive, was rushed to a local hospital where
emergency teams and surgeons battled to keep him alive but after three-and-a-half hours of desperate effort, Saunders died.
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| Greek police examine the crime scene |
The Reaction
The police immediately
launched a manhunt, setting up roadblocks all over the capital and sending out scores of plainclothes officers to search for
the two attackers.
Prime Minister Tony Blair
said: "It was an act of terrorism, it was contemptible as it was senseless." Foreign secretary Robin Cook said he was "appalled
and deeply saddened" by the diplomat's death. Saunders left behind his wife and
two daughters. The following day, newly-widowed Heather emerged from the embassy gates to make
an extraordinary appeal for witnesses.
The international press core fell silent as, fighting for composure, Heather said:
"I only hope that the people that carried out this cowardly act on an unarmed man on his way to work will realise the total
devastation that they have caused,” she said. "Not only have they
killed my husband, but they have now destroyed me and my entire family".
17 November
Fourteen hours later, a
member of N17 rang the mobile phone of an Eleftherotypia (a Greek national paper)
staff writer and claimed that the drive-by shooting was a protest against Saunders’ alleged role in NATO's bombing of
Serbia in 1999.
N17 were sometimes portrayed
by the Greek media as latter-day Robin Hood ideologues, battling Western overlords and NATO in pursuit of Greek interests,
and in defence of Greece's onetime close
allies the Serbs. But the truth was far removed from this romantic notion.
The group was named after
17 November 1973 when the Athens Polytechnic uprising took
place against the military junta, in which at least twenty students, and possibly many more, were killed. Since the military
junta was backed by the United States
as part of that country's anti-Communist efforts, most of the group's attacks were directed at American targets. The group
wanted to rid Greece of US bases, to remove the Turkish military from Cyprus,
and to sever Greece's ties to the NATO
and the European Union.
Over a 25-year period, N17 had killed 23 people, including four US
military and intelligence officials. The group's first attack, which took
place in December 1975, claimed the life of the CIA's Athens
station chief Richard Welch when he was shot outside his home. The group committed further assassinations and around fifty
other attacks.
When NATO launched its
1999 bombing blitz of Yugoslavia, N17 retaliated in Greece with a spate of bomb and rocket attacks that led the US State Department to rank Greece, a NATO ally, second only to Colombia
as one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans.
Threat to the 2004 Olympic Games
Greece was due to host
the Olympic games in 2004, and with this attack concerns began to be voiced about security. The Games had attracted acts of
terror from Munich in 1972 to Atlanta
in 1996.
Police Incompetence?
Not long after the assassination,
the US State Department and Congress published a report which criticised Greece
for failure to act against N17. Some former US
officials alleged that past members of the country's ruling Socialists shared close links with the terrorist group.
It wasn’t as if Greece had the world’s worst terrorists by any stretch
– but the fact that no member of the group had been captured, tried and jailed in its 25-year history was hard to believe.
In the wake of Saunders’ assassination, one US
official told a reporter “What are Greek police doing? Zilch, zip, zero." Yet again, there was not one arrest. Not one
conviction.
In 1999, a 17 November
hit-man was injured while launching a rocket against the residence of the German ambassador. Police found drops of his blood
and collected it as evidence. Then everything went into slow motion. US
officials claimed it took four months for a Greek police crime lab to type the blood. And when it did, according to a State
Department intelligence report published in May 1999, the authorities "did not follow up aggressively, and made no arrest."
In 2000, the Greeks had
a 50,000-strong police force. They knew that NI7 suspects circulated within a neighbourhood a quarter the size of Hyde Park, yet were unable to catch them. Part of the problem, according to the State Department report
was that outdated Greek laws made it hard to arrest and hold terrorists and offered witnesses protection.
Possible past links between
government and 17 November were another problem. Tying powerful figures to the group was a political nightmare for the reform-minded
Prime Minister Costas Simitis, but he really had no choice. Greece's
antiterrorist performance wasn’t just risking the Olympics - it was killing the nation's reputation.
Heather Saunders
Heather Saunders kept silent
for several months to let the security services get on with their work without interference but after one year of no progress
she decided to speak to the BBC documentary programme Correspondent because she
was afraid that her husband’s murder would be forgotten. The programme reawakened public interest in the case and detectives
from Scotland Yard were despatched to Greece
to aid in the investigation.
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| Savas Xiros, the assassin |
Lucky Break
Police made little progress
in their search for the group until 2003, when a bomb being carried by Saunders’ assassin, Savas Xiros, exploded prematurely
leaving him badly injured and in the hands of the authorities.
Xiros stunned investigators
when he suddenly started to make a detailed confession from his hospital bed. He spoke for over ten hours as he detailed his
accomplice’s names and occupations; how they planned terrorist acts; the locations of weapons and so on. He also apologised
to the families of victims.
The investigation that
followed led to an unprecedented level of co-operation between Greek and UK Police services. Xiros's brother, Vassilis, 30,
was arrested and admitted his part in the murder of Saunders.
Thanks to Xiros’s
confession, police found a computer and weapons at N17’s main hide-out, a ground-floor apartment in Athens.
Another weapons cache was discovered shortly afterwards. An assault rifle and bullets were found abandoned near the home of
the Greek president, Constantine Stephanopoulos. Police also found several kilos of explosives buried near a sports stadium
in Athens scheduled to be used for the 2004 Olympic Games.
Within months nineteen suspected members of the group had been held and charged and
Greek police had found the .45 calibre pistol used to kill Brigadier Saunders.
The Trial
Because of a twenty-year
statute of limitations, none of the members were prosecuted for the group's four earliest crimes, including the gunning down
of CIA chief Richard Welch.
But on Thursday December
18, 2003 the curtain came down on one of Greece's
bloodiest dramas when the ringleaders were jailed for life. Rejecting clemency pleas at the close of an often rowdy nine-month
trial, Judge Michalis Margaritis handed multiple life sentences to six members of the group. The gang's founder, Alexandros
Giotopoulos, a professor and translator, received 21 life terms, the longest sentence in Greek legal history.
A defiant Giotopoulos denounced
his sentence as a travesty: "The entire process proved there was no leader ... and there was no evidence, no DNA, that showed
my [role] in any action." Giotopoulos, 60, the son of a famous Trotskyist, claimed he was framed by "British and American
secret services".
Dimitris Koufodinas, its
chief assassin, known as "poison hand" for his skills with a pistol, got fifteen life sentences. Savas Xiros was convicted
of the assassination of Brigadier Saunders and was sentenced to six life terms. Twelve other convicted members were jailed
for from eight years to life. A schoolteacher who had turned himself in received a suspended 25-year sentence.
Heather
Saunders, who had by then been awarded an OBE for her own relentless campaign to find her husband's killers, said the guilty
verdicts were "what we hoped for", but added: "Nobody really wins in this situation…they killed 23 people - 23 widows,
there's goodness knows how many children, how many parents. They will all carry this scar for the rest of their lives."
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