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Journalism of Courage
ATHENS, JUNE 8: Two gunmen on a motorcycle shot and killed the military attache at Britain’s embassy in Athens on Thursday in an attack police said bore the hallmarks of the November 17 terrorist group.
Brigadier Stephen Saunders was shot four times in the abdomen by gunmen on a motorcycle as he drove between Athens and a northern suburb, the hospital said. Saunders, aged about 50, was married and the father of two daughters, the embassy said.
Speaking before the announcement of Saunders’ death, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook condemned the attack as "pointless". "We are all shocked by this brutal, totally pointless attack. We feel very deeply for the defence attache and our thoughts must at this time be with his relatives," Cook told the BBC, speaking from Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital, where he is visiting British troops.
Police said the gunmen opened fire on Saunders with a 45 mm pistol around 8 am as the British official drove a white Rover belonging to the embassy along a major boulevard linking central Athens with the city’s upscale northern suburbs. The gunmen fled and there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. But police said they strongly suspected that the terrorist group known as November 17 was behind the shooting. "The method used, the weapon used, lead us to believe that the assailants belong to November 17, that is the direction we are looking in," said Dimitris Efsthathiadis, a senior official in the ministry for public order.
Police said they found four spent cartridges at the scene from a 45 mm pistol, the weapon used by November 17 in about 20 assassinations attributed to the group since 1975. The group, none of whose members has ever been arrested, has killed more than 20 people over the past 25 years, including US officers, Turks and Greek figures. Considered by Washington to be one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations in the world, November 17 appeared for the first time in December 1975, when the head of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s Athens bureau was murdered. November 17 also claimed responsibility for the May 1999 rocket attack on the Athens residence of German Ambassador Carl Heinz Kunha, as well as a rocket attack in April on the Athens headquarters of the Socialist Party.
The group’s name is taken from the student revolt against Greece’s 1967-1974 military dictatorship, which ended in bloodshed on November 17, 1973. The US State Department sharply criticized the Athens’ government handling of the terrorist problem in a report issued last month. The report drew an angry denial from Greece. "This is a big issue in our relationship," one US official said at the time, pointing to the unsolved assassinations of US diplomats in Greece dating back more than 20 years, and to 20 attacks on US interests in the country in 1999 alone.
The official did add that he thought Athens had shown a "renewed interest in facing the terrorism problem." The Greek government strongly rejected the US findings, especially a statement that Greece was "one of the weakest links in Europe’s efforts against terrorism."
