Fugitive terrorist describes failed prison break on web post

Fugitive terrorist Paula Roupa has described a failed attempt to break her partner Nikos Maziotis and other inmates out of the Greek capital’s Korydallos Prison by helicopter last month in a lengthy post published on an anarchist website in the early hours of Tuesday.

“Organizing the escape of Nikos Maziotis was a political decision… as was the decision to liberate other political prisoners,” Roupa said in her post on Indymedia, referring to the jailed leader of Revolutionary Struggle and other convicted urban guerrillas. “If I had intended only to break out my partner Nikos Maziotis I would not have hired a large helicopter.”

The document describes how she hired a six-seat helicopter on February 21 from the northern Peloponnese under false pretenses and threatened the pilot mid-air to change course toward the capital.

“He preferred to risk crashing with me into the mountain than obeying,” the 47-year-old says in the text, describing how she threatened the pilot at gunpoint and got into a physical altercation after he also pulled a weapon, forcing a landing onto a remote stretch north of the capital.

“When we finally landed with great force and while I knew that the operation was lost, I had every opportunity to execute him. I consciously decided not to,” Roupa says of the pilot, a former police officer. “Despite the fact that I was aware that with this decision I was risking my life and freedom, I didn’t do it even though I had the opportunity. The only thing holding me back was my political conscience.”

In the post, Roupa also describes a bank robbery, which is believed to be an armed holdup of a Pireos Bank branch in the capital’s Sotiria Hospital in June, where a woman wearing a wig made off with an estimated 125,000 euros.

Roupa is still at large after managing to escape from the helicopter pilot.