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The Greek police "muzzled" after making the blunder with the terrorists from RAF

18 January 2011 / 10:01:45  GRReporter
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The Minister of Citizen Protection Cristos Papoutsis prohibited all police services to transfer information before the completion of campaigns and investigations and collating data. The ban followed the police press service blunder of naming the mother of the 27 year-old German girl captured last Friday a member of RAF.

News reports on Greek televisions in the last night of the past week reported that Fei-Marie Meyer was captured in the metropolitan district of Perisos during the largest campaign of the anti-terrorist forces in Athens and Thessaloniki. According to information distributed by the police, the mother of the young girl is Barbara Meyer for which the German authorities have issued an arrest warrant in 1993 for her participation in the German left extremist group Red Army Fraction (RAF). Her father Wolfgang Maier was killed in a gunfight with Austrian police in the early 1980s.

According to the Greek police again, Barbara Meyer fled to Lebanon and surrendered to German authorities in 1999. Several months later she was released. Large part of the Greek media took the information at its face value and reported all these inaccuracies as true.  

The next day, however, the media and the police press office were unpleasantly surprised. A man named Wolfgang Meyer appeared before the prosecutors in Karlsruhe and stated that he was the father of Fei-Marie Meyer arrested in Athens. He lives in Germany and works as a music teacher and his former wife and their daughter live in Greece for years.
 
The mother Barbara who lives in Thessaloniki sent an angry message by a lawyer. It reads: "With this I state that I am not Barabara Meyer who is charged with involvement in the RAF, and my ex-husband Wolfgang Meyer is not her killed husband... I followed with disappointment and anger the news on television and websites last night. I do not know why and how some journalists decided to misinform that my daughter’s parents are wanted or dead terrorists." The mother of Fei-Marie Meyer says in her letter that she will file complaints in court against the journalists that spread false information and also: "And I finally declare that I am not only the mother but also a friend of my daughter. I do not know the contents of the file against her but I know very well that she is an anarchist, not a terrorist."

The Minister of Citizen Protection required in his communication the police to transfer information only in a formal way and "in all cases to respect people’s rights and honour as our legal culture requires."
 
Meanwhile, the police press office tried to justify its serious blunder with the following message: "The investigation of the identity of suspects submitted unofficial information in order not to create misconceptions with regard to possible links of other people to the investigation held by the anti-terrorist office. It mentions that the mother of the arrested is a member of RAF which has no connection with the case."

The 27-year-old German was released because of disagreement between the investigator and the prosecutor after her questioning in the Evelpidon court. She was arrested because of her contacts with the four youths arrested on Thursday.

Tags: Crime newsGreek policeArrestRAFBlunder
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