Greek Scandal Turns Deadly as Terrorists Gun Down Lawmaker

Terrorist gunmen murdered a prominent conservative politician here Tuesday, injecting violence for the first time into the worst political scandal in modern Greek history.

Practiced Marxist killers who are among the most lethal and successful terrorists in Europe fatally shot 54-year-old member of Parliament Pavlos Bakoyannis at his downtown office building Tuesday morning. They escaped.

A few hours later, a shocked Parliament began two days of debate to weigh the alleged involvement of former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou in a $230-million banking scandal, the largest ever in Greece. Bakoyannis’ chair in the somber chamber was filled with red and white roses.

An economist and journalist, Bakoyannis was a first-term member of the Chamber of Deputies, spokesman for the conservative New Democracy Party and son-in-law of Constantine Mitsotakis, party leader and would-be prime minister.

Assassins of the small, virulently anti-American and so far impregnable terrorist group called November 17 shot Bakoyannis five times in the chest in the building on Omiru Street in downtown Athens, police said. He died in the operating room of a nearby hospital about half an hour later.

“The cowardly attack has as its only target the destabilization of our democracy,” charged Defense Minister Yannis Varvitsiotis. The murder came five weeks before scheduled national elections.

Left 12-Page Manifesto

The killers escaped in a yellow sedan stolen earlier. In their wake, they left a 12-page manifesto that accused Bakoyannis of illicit links to banker George Koskotas, who is fighting extradition from the United States.

Koskotas is wanted here to face charges of massive embezzlement from the Bank of Crete he once headed. He claims Papandreou blackmailed him into skimming off millions of dollars to finance his Socialist party election campaign.

Bakoyannis owned a popular magazine that Koskotas bought in 1983 and collaborated with the then-fast-rising star of Greek finance for about two years. No evidence has been produced to demonstrate wrongdoing by Bakoyannis, but the November 17 manifesto charged that he had “embezzled millions” as Koskotas’ “first pillar of support.”

Police said the 9-millimeter pistols used in Tuesday’s attack were the same weapons responsible for four previous November 17 killings. Ambush-assassinations by two or three gunmen are the trademark of the group, which takes its name from a November 17, 1973, student uprising against military officers that ruled Greece.

Tuesday’s assassination of the first sitting member of a Greek government casts the terrorists as a wild card in the political scandal convulsing the country.

After New Democracy replaced Papandreou’s Socialists as the country’s largest party in June elections--but failed to win a parliamentary majority--the conservatives formed an improbable coalition government with also-ran Communist Alliance.

Their announced purpose, underlined by an emotional parliamentary debate that dragged through the night Tuesday, was to oversee a political “catharsis” by bringing to justice officials guilty of corruption during eight years of government by Papandreou.

For their part, Papandreou and his Panhellenic Socialist Movement, or PASOK, complained that they are targets of a witch hunt. Parliament is almost certain to order Papandreou and four of his former ministers to stand trial when debate ends tonight. Last week, it ordered him to trial for allegedly authorizing a network of illegal wiretaps.

November 17’s manifesto Tuesday stated that “everybody is guilty in a political system that must be toppled. Both Papandreou and New Democracy were responsible for the procession of scandal that marked the final years of Socialist government. But in the aftermath, the conservatives had gone unpunished.”

The attack on Bakoyannis, the statement confirmed, was conceived as the twin of a planned assassination last May of former Socialist Finance Minister Georgios Petsos, whom November 17 also accuses of being a key figure in the Koskotas scandal. The attempt against Petsos was one of November 17’s rare failures.

November 17, whose membership is publicly estimated by intelligence agencies at about two dozen, has killed with impunity since 1975, when it murdered Richard Welch, CIA station chief at the U.S. Embassy here.

It killed a U.S. Navy captain in 1983 and a defense attache, Capt. William Nordeen, in June, 1988. Eleven Greeks also have died in 22 attacks since 1975.

The U.S. Department of Defense recently called November 17 “one of the most proficient and lethal terrorist groups in Europe.” It seeks to force Greece from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the U.S. military presence from Greece, but “little is known of its leadership, membership or organization,” the department said.

In 14 years of assassinations and bombings no member of November 17 has ever been caught.