By TNH Staff
September 30, 2019
FILE – Nikos Michaloliakos, leader of Greece’s extreme right Golden Dawn party, delivers a speech during a rally commemorating a 1996 military incident which cost the lives of three Greek navy officers and brought Greece and Turkey to the brink of war, in Athens, on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2019. (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)
ATHENS – Voted out of power and their party disintegrating around them, the hierarchy and former lawmakers of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party were due to testify in the fourth year of their trial on charges of running a criminal gang, one member accused of murder.
It’s been six years since anti-Fascist hip-hop artist Pavlos Fyssas was stabbed in the heart and died in his girlfriend’s arms in an attack prosecutors said was carried out by a party member, Giorgos Roupakias, who was released from pre-trial detention under house arrest.
The party leader, Nikos Michaloliakos and 17 other former Members of Parliament were to take the stand after not showing up for previous sessions and not being compelled by authorities to be in court while the prosecution brought witnesses and revealed thousands of pages of evidence.
Based on the current schedule, the trial could finally wind up by the end of the year with a verdict due early in 2020, the party in disarray over defections, bleeding money and support and with the Fyssas murder too much even for hard-core backers.
More than 100 prosecution witnesses have since testified but fewer than half of the witnesses submitted by the defense appeared. Fyssas’ mother Magda has been at every session. “I owe it to Pavlos. I feel as though he is there himself to face them,” she told the paper earlier. “But this trial is not just about me; it concerns all of us.”
