Greece’s Justice Ministry has launched an investigation on the coroner seeking to determine whether he committed a “disciplinary offense.” He had had falsely claimed that the 11-month-old refugee baby girl from Syria was “sexually abused,” contrary to the official autopsy report that found no signs of abuse of any kind.
“In accordance with the provisions of article 125 of Law 3528/2007, the Minister of Justice, Mr. Costas Tsiaras, asked the Head of the Athens Forensic Service, Mr. Nikolaos Karakoukis, to determine whether or not a disciplinary offense was committed in the case of the 11-month-old infant by a coroner,” the Justice Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
The coroner, one of the two who examined the infant’s body, had spoken of “outrageous and unprecedented sexual abuse.” However, the official autopsy report does not mention neither “sexual abuse” nor “abuse” of any kind.
The coroner’s statements on television channels, broadcast across the country, stigmatized the infants’ parents who while mourning their child, they also had to deal with police, were portrayed as ‘monsters’ by media and exposed to racist comments against refugees.
The parents, aged 22 and 23 years old, are determined to not sue the coroner for the harm his statements caused to the grieving family.
The father considers the statements as “a mistake.”
He said “the truth has shined,” adding “for me the hit was double. The most important was that I lost my little girl and the second that they tried to accuse me that I was a rapist.
It was the father who rushed the dying infant to the Children’s Hospital on Sunday.
The Syrian community is in outrage about the false accusations and the family’s lawyer said on Tuesday, that the Syrian Association will sue the coroner “to teach him a lesson that we must think before we are labeled as rapists of our children.”
On Wednesday, he seemed willing to take a step back from legal measures, but demanded a public apology by the coroner.
“Mpouzianis should go out and apologize publicly. If he does, we will stop, otherwise we will finish him with the provisions the law gives us,” lawyer Aruan Bakri told ANT1 TV.
President of the Hellenic Forensic Medicine Association, Grigoris Leon, described coroner’s hasty statements as a “tragic mistake.”
