Alexandros Giotopoulos, the man convicted as the leader of Greece’s notorious militant group 17 November, has been returned to prison just three weeks after being granted conditional release, following a decision by the country’s highest court to overturn the ruling that allowed him to walk free.
Police arrested the 80-year-old at his home in the Athens suburb of Vyronas on Sunday after the Judicial Council of the Supreme Court accepted an appeal challenging his parole. He was escorted back to Korydallos prison under police supervision.
Giotopoulos is serving one of the harshest sentences ever handed down in Greece: 17 life terms plus an additional 25 years for his role in directing and instigating the activities of 17 November, the left-wing urban guerrilla organisation responsible for a string of assassinations, bombings and armed attacks between 1975 and 2002. The group targeted Greek politicians, businessmen, police officers and foreign diplomats, including US, British and Turkish officials, before it was dismantled in the early 2000s.
His release on 21 May came after his fifth application for parole and followed 24 years in prison. The decision by the Piraeus Court of Appeals had imposed strict conditions, including a ban on leaving Greece, mandatory reporting to local police and a requirement that he remain at his registered residence in Vyronas.
However, prosecutors argued that the ruling had been legally flawed. Deputy Supreme Court Prosecutor Sofoklis Logothetis maintained that Giotopoulos had not fulfilled the statutory requirement for prisoners serving multiple life sentences to complete 25 years of actual imprisonment before becoming eligible for release. The Supreme Court’s Judicial Council agreed, finding that neither the substantive nor procedural conditions for parole had been met.
The ruling effectively reinstates an earlier decision by a lower court that had rejected Giotopoulos’s request for release. He will remain in custody while the Piraeus Court of Appeals reconsiders the case with a newly constituted panel of judges.
The case has reignited debate over the treatment of convicted members of 17 November, whose attacks left 23 people dead over nearly three decades and profoundly shaped Greece’s modern security landscape. Other senior members of the organisation, including Dimitris Koufodinas and brothers Christodoulos and Savvas Xiros, remain behind bars.
The controversy also prompted an unusual diplomatic intervention. The US State Department publicly called on the Greek authorities to ensure that Giotopoulos returned to prison, a move that drew criticism from Greece’s Association of Judges and Prosecutors, which accused Washington of attempting to influence the country’s independent judiciary.
For now, Giotopoulos’s brief period of freedom has come to an abrupt end, pending a fresh judicial review of whether he is entitled to parole under Greek law.
