Golden Dawn members named in criminal report

A Greek public prosecutor has recommended that 70 members of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement, including 18 people elected to the country’s parliament in 2012, stand trial, according to a legal source.

Prosecutor Isidoris Dogiakos’s 700-page legal document, released on Thursday, alleged Golden Dawn involvement in the high-profile murder of anti-facist rapper Pavlos Fyssas and attacks on members of the communist party and immigrant Pakistani workers in Crete.

The prosecutor’s report will now be studied by three judges and a decision on a possible trial is expected within the next two months.

On Thursday, Greece’s justice minister Haralambos Athanasiou said “those who will be judged will receive a fair trial”, amid claims by Golden Dawn supporters that the report is politically motivated.

Among those who Dogiakos recommends to face trial is the Golden Dawn leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, who was arrested after the killing of Fyssas in September 2013 and has been held in jail ever since.

Dogiakos’s year-long investigation began after the murder of Fyssas, a crime which shocked Greece and forced authorities to crack down on Golden Dawn after years of mounting concern about the party’s actions.

Founded in the 1980s, the openly xenophobic and anti-Jewish Golden Dawn was for years a semi-clandestine group on the fringes of Greek politics.

But in 2012 the party exploited widespread anger over immigration and austerity reforms prompted by Greece’s financial crisis to take 18 seats in parliament.

Dogiakos, in his document, said that a political party which seeks to “achieve its objectives through the use of physical force or weapons is not legal”.