Authorities lie – European MP

Athens

– A former senior official with Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party yesterday accused authorities of fabricating evidence in a landmark murder trial implicating dozens of party members.

Yiannis Lagos, elected to the European parliament in May, told a court that cellphone exchanges with other fellow suspects on the night of the 2013 murder had been “stitched up” to incriminate them.

“I do not accept the charges,” Lagos said, denying any responsibility for the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas by an alleged Golden Dawn member.

Lagos was elected to the European parliament with Golden Dawn but defected from the party a few weeks later, citing disagreement with its policies.

Once Greece’s third-strongest party, Golden Dawn has been in disarray as a verdict in the fouryear trial edges closer.

The party suffered heavy losses in a July general election, failing to enter parliament for the first time since 2012.

Based on a flurry of phone conversations between alleged Golden Dawn members on the night Fyssas was murdered, the prosecution says the act was allegedly carried out with the knowledge of senior party members, Lagos among them.

Lagos is among more than a dozen current and former senior Golden Dawn members on trial, including party chief Nikolaos Michaloliakos, who is to testify in November.

In the party’s military-style hierarchy, Lagos was its local commander for the Piraeus area, where Fyssas died, prosecutors found.

The rapper’s mother Magda Fyssas has also claimed Lagos had given party henchmen the goahead to stab her son.

“Nothing would have been done without approval from Lagos, there is no chance,” she told the court in 2015.

Alongside many other senior Golden Dawn members, Lagos was jailed after Fyssas’ murder but was released pending the conclusion of the trial. –