Former PASOK Defense Minister and inmate Akis Tsochatzopoulos was brutally beaten in his cell in wing F of Korydallos prison in Athens. The former minister convicted for bribes in armament procurement was taken to the prison hospital to receive first aid as he had suffered “heavy beating”.
According to daily Ethnos, the attacker was inmate Vasilis Stafanakos, who is serving many years in prison for inciting a murder committed in 2006 by Albanian criminal Alket Rizai.
The incident occurred last Thursday around 20:30, at the time when prisoners were to be locked in their cells.
The 77-year-old former minister reportedly complained to a prisoner about the lights that were on and asked him to turn them off. Stefanakos moved against Tsochatzopoulos, told him “Why are you shouting, stupid swab?” and started to beat him and thus “in front of the eyes of prion guards who did nothing to protect the ex minister and put an end to the incident.”
Ethnos notes that the names of Akis Tsohatzopoulos and Vasilis Stefanakos were included in the voluminous charge file of 2015 regarding a criminal organization involved among others in extortion, money laundering, bribes, and attempted murder from 2011 onward. “In this file, the former minister was accused of inciting three bomb attacks against a former general armaments secretary of Defense Ministry,” so Ethnos.
In 2013, Akis Tsochatzopoulos was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for “money laundering from criminal activity and in particular by the continuing consecutively passive corruption against the Greek government ” throughout his tenure as Defense Minister from 1997 until 2001.
One is entitled to ask “who are the real criminals in Greece?” Even Tsochatzopoulos is a minor issue when human rights are denied, and government ministers, prison authorities and the Greek judicial system could not give a fuck about anything except themselves. Not so different from Turkey, other than Greece does not have an Erdogan…