The Police may have been praised for the prompt arrest of hardened criminal Arber Bako, however it appears that the recent arrest has revealed a series of procedural errors in another case.
Bako, as revealed, was part of a criminal gang in Greece which appears to have been involved in the shooting of a lawyer in Penteli. The victim of the attack in Penteli told Police that the assailants spoke broken English and were freshly shaven. He is also said to have identified two expatriates from the former USSR “without a doubt”.
The Police has revealed that it located the two suspects, aged 27 and 29, after receiving an «anonymous phone call«, according to which the two had been associated with minor crimes. The anonymous caller also alleged that they had received «inside information» from another expatriate who worked a foreman for the 60-year-old lawyer.
The 60-year-old lawyer later claimed that the shooting was not a simple robbery go wrong, but perhaps it was related to a case he had handled in the past. The Police however rejected this possibility, insisting that the main motive of the shooting was robbery.
When the two expatriates were arrested though, they were found to speak Greek fluently, while photographic evidence from one to two days following the shooting showed that they both had big beards, contrary to the victim’s testimony. The two suspects also presented alibis placing, while the 48-year-old foreman who worked for the victim and the Police alleges to have instructed them had left since May and was hospitalized at the time of the shooting.
The case-file of the Penteli shooting reveals further police blunders, such as omitting to cross-reference DNA from discarded cigarette butts found near the attack with DNA samples from the two suspects. This became clear when the Police attempted to cross-reference DNA samples recovered from Arber Baco’s hotel room, which matched samples from the cigarette butts.
The lawyer of one of the two Penteli shooting suspects has called for the Penteli and Mikrolimano case-files to be associated immediately, while Police sources reported that the case “will be extremely interesting”.
