Trial looms for 2019 betting shop robbers
A council of appeals court judges is to decide later this week whether to try three suspects accused of membership of the Revolutionary Self-Defense urban guerrilla group.
Vangelis Stathopoulos and Dionysis Bakas were arrested after an armed robbery at a betting shop in the northern Athens suburb of Holargos in 2019. The third, Dimitris Hatzivassiliadis, who was injured during the robbery, is still at large.
Bakas has denied being a member of the group, but admitted to treating Hatzivassiliadis in his apartment near the site of the robbery. He must also answer to the discovery in his apartment of the assault rifle used in the robbery but also of another rifle used in attacks against police in 2014 and 2017 and on the Mexican Embassy in 2016.
Stathopoulos is challenging the state’s evidence that his blood was on the motorcycle used to flee the scene of the Holargos robbery and claims to have been told to go to Bakas’ house – where the pair were arrested – by a third, unnamed party.
