By a Staff Reporter
THE man Greek police named yesterday as leader of the notorious November 17 guerrilla group was sentenced to jail in absentia by the military junta in the 1970s for organising resistance to their hardline rule.
Alexander Giotopoulos is the son of a renowned Greek Trotskyite of the 1930s and 1940s who fought on the republican side in the Spanish civil war. Born in 1944 in Paris, where his father was heavily involved in the Stalin-era struggle for control of international communism, Giotopoulos returned to the French capital in time to take part in the May 1968 student riots.
In the same year he went to Cuba for military training as part of a radical group named “May 29”. Three years later — at the height of Greece’s 1967-74 US-backed military rule — a Greek court sentenced him in absentia to five years in prison for “acts against the security of the state”.
Several Greeks who went into self-exile in Paris during the 1967-1974 period have said Giotopoulos was a quiet man, soft-spoken and helpful. “He was a very polite man, a stand-up guy and always willing to help,” Greek film director Giorgos Katakouzinos, who met him in Paris, told the daily newspaper Ta Nea.
For many years after the Paris street riots, friends and acquaintances lost all trace of Giotopoulos. Many believe it was his Paris connections that led November 17 to choose the French capital as the place to announce its first killing — that of CIA Athens station chief Richard Welch in 1975.
The group sent its claim of responsibility for the killing to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who passed it on to the left-wing daily Liberation.
The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.
