Entire Golden Dawn parliamentary group should stand trial, says prosecutor

All 16 MPs of the ultranationalist party Golden Dawn, as well as two deputies who have quit the party, should stand trial on charges of belonging to an running a criminal organization, prosecutor Isidoros Dogiakos said on Thursday in a recommendation to a council of judges.

In a 700-page brief drafted after reviewing the weighty case failed against GD, Dogiakos argued that a total of 70 of the 85 members of the far-right party originally accused of criminal offenses ought to stand before a court and that every member of the party’s parliamentary group belongs or belonged to the “hard core” of Golden Dawn, a “criminal organization” that operated “under the party’s cloak.”

According to sources cited by the Athens-Macedonia News Agency, Dogiakos made references to all of the charges being brought against the party as a whole and against individual members, stressing especially the murders of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in September 2013 and of Pakistani national Luqman Shahzad in central Athens in January of the same year, as well as several assaults on foreign migrants and leftist activists.