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Thirteen days before the trial, three of the people listed as members of the terrorist organization Revolutionary Struggle, which took political responsibility for the actions of the group, were released due to the expiry of the maximum period of detention.

The trial against Nikos Maziotis, Panagiota Roupa, Costas Gournas and 5 other defendants is expected to begin on October 24. The 18-month statutory limit for detention while awaiting trial has expired, taken up by bureaucratic procedures, which resulted in the release of the defendants. According to sources, the main reason for the delay of the questioning procedure was that the police had sent the documentation to the investigators gradually and not in a timely manner.

The three defendants were released after being restricted from leaving Greece, they had to stay in the region of Attica and present themselves to the local police station every five days.

When they appeared in the yard of Korydallos prison in early October, when the trial against them was  to begin, Nikos Maziotis, Panagiota Roupa and Costas Gournas said they were "proud of the organization." They tried to give political overtones to the case, arguing that they had no regret "for the political choice of our struggle," and added that eventually "we will win." In the letter, which was recently published on the Internet, they indicated that their aim was to show "the eternal relevance of armed struggle as an indispensable element of the revolutionary movement."

The remaining five defendants are Christos Kortesis, Evangelos Stathopoulos, Sarandos Nikitopoulos, Maria Beraha and Kostas Katsenos. All except the last one, who surrendered to authorities last week, are at liberty after restrictive measures were imposed upon them.

Kortesis, Statopoulos and Nikitopoulos deny the allegations and try to refute by arguing that they are the result of "the criminalization of our social and friendship contacts."

The six defendants, without Beraha and Katsenos, were captured on April 10, 2010. Some of the attacks that are believed to have been committed by members of Revolutionary Struggle include an attack on a police squad at the Ministry of Culture, an attack on a police bus in front of the Polytechnic University, firing a rocket at the building of the U.S. Embassy in Athens and others.

The charges are of different degrees and the three main defendants who were released yesterday will face the most serious of them. In particular, the indictment contains the following allegations: participation in a terrorist organization, repeated attempts to murder by complicity, supply, construction and possession of explosives and bombs, exploding, causing major damage, illegal carrying of weapons, using weapons and illegal possession of weapons.

According to sources, CDs and decoded phone calls, which are believed to contain the conversations held by the defendants, have been added to the court files. The trial against the members of the group is expected to begin on October 24.

Meanwhile, the Greek police have arrested the members of "thieves with Kalashnikovs" who have horrified the people with their daring robberies. Greek society was amazed to find out that the people who had frightened the residents of the northern and south-eastern suburbs of Athens were under 25 years old, and the youngest of them were even minors - 15 and 16 years old.

The oldest member of the gang who pulled the wires is 24 years old, another two are brothers, who the police seized in a school in Daphne occupied by students. They, like the 15-year-old boy, are of Albanian origin. The fifth member of the gang is a 16-year-old girl of Greek origin - a friend of one of the boys. According to unnamed police sources, she was watching the houses that the gang was preparing to rob. A recording by a security camera in a bank branch and a stolen mobile phone, which the thieves gave a man in Lamia, "betrayed" the gang to the police. The video shows how one of the members of the group along with his accomplices took a 52-year-old businessman to the ATM to withdraw and give them money, having raided his home in the suburb of Voula.

The police captured five members of the gang and were after two more who are also believed to be young.

According to police sources, the cruellest of all was 24-year-old Enea Pano, who participated in the five cases of rape during the robberies. In a stolen car, in which the police found the 16-year-old Greek girl and her boyfriend, there was a loaded 9 mm gun, a cartridge with seven bullets and a knife. At their home in the metropolitan district of Neos kosmos there were two Kalashnikov guns, filler with 27 and 28 cartridges, 93 cartridges for guns, a foldable metal baton, shells and bullets, a small amount of marijuana, a large number of mobile phones, electronics and appliances.

As reported by the police, the gang has carried out at least 23 robberies, during which its members were very cruel to their victims, even when they were mothers with small children. They raped the women in front of their children who heard their cries.

The Athens prosecutor's office accusations to the "thieves with Kalashnikovs" are particularly serious, and the punishment for some of them is life imprisonment.