With faces sad and tired, with their characteristics pulled after their nightmare lasting several months but with dignity and determination in their look, the parents of those sentenced in the Conspiracy Cells of Fire case, welcomed on Wednesday relatives, friends, journalists and dozens of other people of all ages, eminent and not, that arrived in the room of ESIEA (Journalists’ Union of the Athens Daily Newspapers) for a press conference.
One week after the decision of the Three-member Court of appeals that sentenced from 11 to 25 years of imprisonment six of the nine accused, the parents and the advocates of those sentenced are not willing to give up. In the press conference they accused the court of a “political decision”, of ”inhumanity and vengefulness”, while they claimed one more time that the three explosions that did not cause an injury or death of anyone do not justify the total of 130 years of imprisonment that the court “shared out” to their children.
A dead silence prevailed in the room when with a shaking voice Mrs. Hadjimihelaki, mother of 19 yearold Haris Hadjimihelakis who was sentenced to 25 years of imprisonment, read the collective statement of the parents. “It was an unfair decision, callous, exhaustive, absurd, arbitrary, inhuman, vengeful. It was a decision that based on the nazi logic of collective responsibility, it targeted individuals based solely on their ideology”, said characteristically Mrs. Hadjimihelaki.
She added that ”the infamous ‘explosions’ are proven not to have caused any danger to a person and the testimonies of the witnesses absolutely clarified they were actions in the ‘sphere’ of political protest”. As for the results of the ‘explosions’, even through the expertise of the people of the responsible service, it was shown that it was firecrackers with a non standardized gunpowder, which can cause a deflagration and not an explosion”, she mentioned.
She left in the end political hints stressing that “Justice punishes brutally and mercilessly destroys young people with guesses and conclusions and not for actions. And leaves unpunished those involved in enormous political and economic scandals, which put at risk the lives of people and the constitutional structures of country”.