Prosecutor seeks acquittal of Golden Dawn leader

Golden Dawn leader Nikos Michaloliakos and other high-ranking officials should be acquitted of charges of running a criminal organization, the prosecutor in the ongoing trial against the neo-Nazi party said on Wednesday.

In her recommendations to the court, Adamantia Oikonomou said there has been a dearth of evidence to support accusations that Golden Dawn’s leadership had any part in the planning or execution of any of the crimes listed in the charge sheet, including the murders of 34-year-old antifascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and 27-year-old Pakistani laborer Shazat Luqman, both in 2013.

Earlier, Oikonomou had said that Golden Dawn’s leadership should also be cleared of any involvement in the murder of Fyssas by a self-professed party member, arguing that Giorgos Roupakias was acting on his own when he stabbed the musician to death.

She had also argued in favor of lesser charges being brought against nine party members accused of two brutal attacks carried out, in 2012 and 2013, on four Egyptian fishermen and on a group of communist-affiliated PAME unionists in the Piraeus port suburb of Perama.

The prosecutor described these incidents as “isolated acts for which the leadership was not responsible.”

“A political party’s ideology is irrelevant from the point of view of criminal law; what we’re investigating are criminal acts,” Oikonomou said.

She also cited Golden Dawn’s failure to be elected to Parliament in the last general elections earlier this summer as indicative that the Fyssas murder had harmed its popularity.

Oikonomou’s recommendations regarding the Fyssas murder prompted a scathing response from the musician’s mother, Magda Fyssa, who has attended every session of the court since the trial began in April 2015.

“Today, on the 18th, Pavlos Fyssas has been dead for 75 months. You chose today to stab him again?” Magda Fyssa asked the prosecutor shortly before departing from the courtroom.