By Martin Hellicar
THE HOUSE plenum yesterday gave the green light to Attorney-general Alecos Markides to challenge an Assizes court decision to acquit three Aeroporos brothers of attempted murder charges.
A bill empowering the Attorney-general to appeal to the Supreme Court against Assizes court decisions was passed unanimously and without debate yesterday afternoon.
Markides is now expected to lodge today an eleventh-hour challenge of the June 19 decision acquitting Aeroporos brothers Hambis, 35, Andros, 30, and Panicos, 25, of involvement in the shooting of gambling club owner Antonis Fanieros in Larnaca on May 29 last year.
The bill stipulates THAT any appeal must be made within 14 days of the original decision – by today in the case of the Aeroporos decision.
Markides has described the acquittal as “wrong”, and had asked the House to pass the bill, pending since January last year, as a matter of urgency. Until now, the Attorney-general could only challenge District Court decisions.
Faced with a long list of bills to consider yesterday, deputies decided to pass the bill unanimously, even though differences of opinion had been registered during debate of the legislation at the House legal affairs committee last week.
The acquittal of the Aeroporos brothers sparked a row between Markides and well-known lawyer Efstathios Efstathiou, who defended the brothers. Efstathiou charged Markides with undermining the Assizes by criticising the acquittal. Markides attacked Efstathiou for attending a party thrown by the Aeroporos family on Sunday to celebrate the brothers’ court victory, saying his presence at a party given wide media coverage gave the “wrong messages”.
The Assizes acquitted the three Aeroporos brothers after dismissing the testimony of chief Prosecution witness Tassos Simellides, who is serving a nine-year sentence for acting as get-away driver for the hit. Simellides, 28, named Hambis as instigator, Andros as architect and Panicos as hit-man for the machine-gun attack.
In their decision, the judges stated that police and Justice Minister Nicos Koshis had “made promises” to Simellides to get him to testify against the suspects.
During the year-long trial, Efstathiou labelled Simellides a liar who had cut a deal with police to help secure the conviction of the Aeroporos brothers in exchange for seeing out his sentence at a country estate and passage abroad afterwards.
Last year’s attack was described as a gangland hit, part of an ongoing feud between Limassol and Larnaca gangs vying for control of lucrative gambling, prostitution and drugs rings.
Fanieros, 57, survived despite being hit in the neck as he came under a hail of machine-gun fire.
No finger-prints belonging to any of the suspects were found on the motorbike, machine-gun or any of the other items found by police after the hit, the Assizes noted.
