Top Greek November 17 members get life in prison

A Greek court yesterday handed down multiple life sentences to the mastermind and the chief hitman of the November 17 guerilla group, which killed British, US and Turkish diplomats and Greeks in a 27-year reign of terror.

Last week, the three-judge court found the two and 13 other members of the radical Marxist group guilty of some 2,500 crimes, including multiple murders, bombings and bank robberies. Four defendants were acquitted, but the public prosecutor said he would appeal two of those acquittals.

The convictions, at the end of a marathon trial, removed a major security threat ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.

"For the murder of Stephen Saunders: Dimitris Koufodinas, life. Alexandros Giotopoulos, life," presiding judge Michalis Margaritis said, referring to the group's last killing, the shooting of the British military attache in Athens in 2000.

The mastermind of the shadowy gang, Giotopoulos, 59, was found guilty last week of 961 crimes including plotting 19 murders. He was given 21 life sentences, the longest term in Greek legal history.

The jobless mathematics professor, who was a student radical in Paris in the 1960s, had protested his innocence throughout the trial and said he would appeal against the verdict which he ridiculed as US-inspired "theatre".