Second killer in Salonica stabbing?

As the wife of a Thessaloniki man stabbed to death last week testified yesterday in connection to the murder by her sister, who claimed sexual abuse, sources in the northern port city said a second killer may have been present at the crime. Upon exiting the Thessaloniki examining magistrate’s office, Irene Kankova, who followed her husband, Giorgos Kehiopoulos, 41, to Greece from the former Soviet Union in 1992, told journalists she had been totally unaware of Kehiopoulos’s alleged relationship with her 21-year-old sister, Natalia. Natalia Kankova, who has confessed to killing Kehiopoulos last Monday with a kitchen knife in the Aristotelous Square office they shared, originally told police the dead man was her father. Giving her age as 19, she said he had regularly forced her to have sexual relations with him since she was 14. But it later emerged that the Thessaloniki computer student was the victim’s sister-in-law, who had been registered as his daughter as part of an immigration scam. Natalia Kankova, however, insisted that Kehiopoulos had sexually abused her, and that she killed him in self-defense when he tried to strangle her, and after she begged him to leave her alone. But police sources said yesterday that the pathologist who examined Kehiopoulos found indications that a second killer may have been involved. Samuel Dugu – who is to testify today – is understood to have ascertained that the stab wounds on Kehiopoulos were caused by different knives. Furthermore, Dugu has not found sufficient signs of a strangulation attempt against Natalia Kankova.