Greek police 'battered four terrorist suspects then launched cover-up'

Authorities urged to investigate 'Guantanamo' style tactics allegedly used on four men caught during bank robberies

Greek authorities on Monday faced an uproar after allegations that police had brutally beaten four suspected members of a local terrorist group before publishing manipulated mugshots of the men in a crude attempt to disguise their injuries.

A prominent Athens prosecutor ordered an investigation after relatives of the men – aged between 20 and 24 – accused Greek police of adopting "Guantanamo- style" tactics.

There was a public outcry after the media published doctored pictures of the suspects who were arrested on Friday after attempting to rob two banks in the crisis-hit north. Despite digitally altering the photos the detainees bruised eyes and lips were evident.

Promising that instances of torture, would not be tolerated, the Greek public order minister, Nikos Dendias, said "punishment will be merciless".

"There is no desire to cover [up] anyone for anything," he told the private TV channel Mega. Earlier, the public order ministry had issued a statement describing the detainees as being especially dangerous.

"They [had] threatened human lives with Kalashnikovs and they had taken a hostage," it said. "Armed engagements don't happen with the exchange of flowers, the accused had … resisted arrest."

All four are believed to be linked to politically extreme militant groups that have arisen on the right and left in Greece in the past three years, as the countryhas been increasingly hobbled by economic crisis and social upheaval.

Two of the detained men, Yannis Michailidis, 24, and Dimitris Politis, 21, were said to be members of the urban guerilla group Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire and were tried in absentia.

The gang gained notoriety in 2010 when it claimed responsibility for a series of mail bombings targeting foreign embassies and European officials. German chancellor Angela Merkel's office in Berlin was one of those attacked although no one was injured in the blasts.

A third suspect, whose picture was printed in newspapers on Monday, is Nikos Romanos, 20, described as the best friend of Alexis Grigoropoulos, the teenager shot by police in December 2008. His death led to widespread violence that shocked the nation and its European partners.

Like his friend, Romanos, who was present on the night of the shooting, comes from a family of businessmen and writers in Athens's wealthy northern suburbs. On Monday he described himself as a "prisoner of war." Police claim his fingerprints had been found in a safe house used by the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire.

Dendias said the mug-shots had been released by police, despite digital doctoring, so that the suspects would be "recognisable to the public" and authorities could conduct further investigations into possible hide-outs they had used.

An anonymous tip-off led police to a safe house rented by some of the suspects in the Athens suburb of Maroussi on Monday.

But the crude Photoshop methods used to tone down the injuries the men had sustained has unleashed political outrage including opposition from the radical left Syriza party. Describing the methods as a "disgrace," the party reminded Greeks of the Guardian's exposure last year of similar cases of brutality.

"Mr Dendias' statements are further evidence of the right-wing turn of today's government which is targeting… rights, freedoms and finally democracy itself," the Syriza party said and it called for a thorough investigation.With the government clearly on the defence even the small Democrat Left party, which is supporting it, felt fit to decry the police tactics. "Terrorism is the enemy of society and democracy must confront it decisively… but democracy does not exact revenge. An investigation and explanation are required as regards the faces that have clearly been deformed due to the brutality used."

• Greece
• Europe
• Global terrorism

Helena Smith

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Greece says in 2012 it met deficit-cutting targets

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Greece says in 2012 it met deficit-cutting targets CBS News NEW YORK The Greek government said Monday its painful austerity drive is paying off, with the budget deficit reduced to the target of 6.6 percent of annual output in 2012 from 9.4 percent a year earlier. A finance ministry statement said that, not ... Greece Meets 2012 Budget GoalsFox Business Greece meets budget targets in 2012: govtThe Australian Greece Says It Met Budget Targets in 2012Novinite.com Nzweek all 9 news articles »

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Greek police 'Photoshop away' signs of brutality

Greek police 'Photoshop away' signs of brutality Amnesty International Greek authorities must investigate accusations of torture after mugshots of four bank-robbery suspects were doctored to remove signs of injury, Amnesty International said today. On Friday, 1 February the suspects were arrested by the police in relation ...

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Greece probes police 'beatings'

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Greece probes police 'beatings' BBC News A prosecutor in Greece has ordered an inquiry into whether four suspected bank robbers were beaten in police custody, after complaints by relatives. The move also comes after the police issued the men's mug shots that were digitally altered to make ... Greek court orders probe of alleged police beatingMiamiHerald.com Greece Denies Terror Suspects BeatenGreek Reporter Altered mug shots spur probe into Greek police beatingsReuters all 18 news articles »

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Richard III's scarred skeleton becomes a battlefield for academics

Leicester enjoys its moment in the spotlight as discovery of last Plantagenet king's bones sparks fierce debate among historians

As in 1485, once the death of the king was confirmed, the arguments started. Was the search for the man in the car park a stunt and a media circus, or a classic piece of research archaeology based on sound science, which opens a window on a period of history fogged by Tudor propaganda?

The debate will certainly last longer than Richard's two-year reign. Before the identification had even been formally confirmed, the redoubtable historian Mary Beard had waded in on Twitter: "Gt fun & a mystery solved that we've found Richard 3. But does it have any HISTORICAL significance? (Uni of Leics overpromoting itself?))"

Meanwhile, the bones that have just been confirmed as those of Richard III – the last Plantagenet king, the last monarch to die on a battlefield, whose death ushered in the upstart Tudors – lay quietly in a calm room on the second floor of the Leicester University library, unknown to many of the students bustling in and out of the building.

Inevitably, the press conference in another building – with 140 registered journalists and camera crews from seven countries – was controlled mayhem, but the university had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that the actual remains were treated with respect.

The press conference had revealed the appalling nature of the injuries inflicted in the last moments of Richard's life and, perhaps even more gruesomely, in the hours afterwards.

But in the quiet room with the blinds drawn there were no banners, no university logos – still less those of the Channel 4 camera crew, which has been following the hunt from the start – just the bones, stained a reddish brown by their centuries in the clay, laid out on a black velvet cloth on four library tables pushed together, protected by a glass case. Journalists were invited to "bear witness". All visitors, including university staff, had to sign a declaration that they would make no attempt to photograph or record anything, and that they would remain silent in the room where he lay, watched over by a security guard and two university chaplains.

The feet were missing, probably chopped off when a Victorian outhouse was built on the site of the long-lost Greyfriars church, missing the main skeleton by inches. The hands lay by his side, but as found suggested that he was buried with arms still bound, just as he was lugged from the battlefield. The skull lay with the largely undamaged face up – itself a significant and sinister point, according to the experts, hiding the savage blow to the base from a halberd, a fearsome medieval pike-like weapon, which sliced through bone and into the brain and would have killed him in seconds.

The shock was the spine, bent like an aerial view of the river Thames – it was not, after all, simply Tudor propaganda, which had portrayed the king as a twisted psychopath.

Jo Appleby, the bones expert who excavated the skeleton and has worked on it for months, said it was contorted by scoliosis, which set in some time after he was 10, from an unknown cause. She said it would have made Richard's breathing increasingly more difficult, and taken inches off what would have been his full height of 5' 8" (172cm), a reasonably tall man for medieval times.

There was another sword slash to the skull, which would also have penetrated to the brain and proved fatal in moments, but the others came after death, and were described – in an image still resonant from many battlegrounds today – as "humiliation injuries". They could not have happened to a man protected by armour, and are consistent with the accounts of his body being stripped on the battlefield, and brought back to Leicester naked, slung over the pommel of a horse. That, almost certainly, was when the thrusting injury through the right buttock and into the pelvis happened.

Professor Lin Foxhall, head of the university's archaeology department, and Bob Savage, an expert on medieval weapons from the Royal Armouries, pointed out that Richard's face was relatively undamaged.

"They'd killed the king and they needed to keep him recognisable," Savage said. "To me, the injuries are fully consistent with the accounts of his dying in a melee, and [being] unhorsed – I believe he was dead within minutes of coming off his horse. But they took care not to bash the face about too much."

"It's the Gaddafi effect," Foxhall said. "We saw just this in the horrible mobile-phone footage of Gaddafi being found, and you can hear the voices shouting 'not the face, don't touch the face'. It's one of those dreadful lessons from history which we never learn."

The grumbles that this was all show  business, not history, went on throughout the day. Neville Morley, professor of ancient history at the University of Bristol, muttered on his Bristol Classics blog: "Whoop-de-doo … Why is it that a skeleton is interesting only if it's that of a famous person?"

On her History Matters blog, Catherine Fletcher, lecturer in public history at Sheffield University, wrote: "Imagine that the Leicester archaeologists had uncovered not a royal grave, but a grave of some peasant farmers, results from which completely changed the picture of what we know about human nutrition in the 15th century. Not so glamorous, but just as important in understanding the past – perhaps more so. They wouldn't have the media pull of 'England's lost king'. Traditional 'kings and queens' history, so criticised over the decades by historians, still plays very well on TV."

Foxhall, whose own field is the more ancient battlefields of Greece and Rome, said that to identify any named individual from such a remote period was "fantastically rare – and valuable. It's the fact that he was a king that lets us get to the identification."

Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist on the project, pointed out that – apart from disentangling Richard's last day on earth from the fog of Tudor propaganda, led by its most brilliant exponent, William Shakespeare – the story of the king from the car park is also another lost strand in the history of Leicester, wreathed in rumour, until now very short on fact.

Turi King, the researcher who confirmed the match of mitochondrial DNA – genetic material passed down through the mother's line – between the skeleton and the Canadian-born Michael Ibsen, who is descended from Richard's sister Anne of York, and with another newly identified but anonymous descendant, says the work continues. This phase was only completed on Saturday night, she said, but will be published in full in a peer-reviewed journal.

The city is wasting no time profiting from its day in the international media spotlight. A temporary exhibition opens this week in the Guildhall, near the site, and next year a permanent new visitor centre will open, possibly on the same day that the russet bones are re-interred in a newly designed tomb in the cathedral. Expect a few of the camera crews to return.

Meanwhile, Ibsen, the man whose spit proved the vital link across almost six centuries, grew more quiet and subdued as the day wore on. "My head is no clearer now than when I first heard the news," he said.

"Many, many hundreds of people died on that field that day. He was a king, but just one of the dead. He lived in very violent times, and these deaths would not have been pretty – or quick."

• Richard III
• Monarchy
• Leicester
• Archaeology
• Forensic science

Maev Kennedy

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Greek finance minister sent bullet in the mail

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Greek finance minister sent bullet in the mail Yahoo! News (blog) Reuters/Reuters - Greek Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras is seen in his office in Syntagma square in Athens January 16, 2013 during an interview with Reuters. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis. ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's finance minister was sent a bullet ... and more »

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Greek finance ministry says deficit narrowed to 6.6 percent of GDP in 2012 ...

Novinite.com

Greek finance ministry says deficit narrowed to 6.6 percent of GDP in 2012 ... Fox News ATHENS, Greece – The Greek government says its painful austerity drive is paying off, with the budget deficit reduced to 6.6 percent of annual output in 2012 from 9.4 percent a year earlier. A finance ministry statement Monday said that, not counting ... Greek market ends higherCapital.gr (press release) all 9 news articles »

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