The widow of a British diplomat murdered last year by a radical group in Greece appealed to the Greek people on Monday to help find her husband's killers.
Heather Saunders, whose husband Brigadier Stephen Saunders was military attache at the British embassy in Athens, was speaking after an inquest in Salisbury, southwest England, into his death.
She denied that her husband had helped plan the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 -- the justification offered for his murder by November 17, the radical Marxist group that gunned him down.
She said at a press conference after the inquest: "The Greek people see November 17 as some sort of secret society, almost like the Mafia, very elusive and all cloak and dagger."
"It's that that's part of the problem, which prevents them from being caught. There is this mystique that surrounds them."
"But let's hope Greece will put terrorists behind bars forever and be the first society to show they will not tolerate it."
Asked at the inquest about the claims of November 17 that her husband was a legitimate target because of his role in NATO, Heather Saunders said: "That's absolute lies.... For a start he wasn't high enough up to make decisions."
She said that during the 1999 Kosovo conflict, her 52-year-old husband was at home in Britain and going to Greek lessons every day.
Saunders died from gunshot wounds in Athens' Red Cross Hospital on June 8 last year after two men on a motorcycle pulled up alongside his car in traffic and fired at him through the passenger window.
The inquest, which aims to establish the cause of a person's death, and not who was responsible, recorded a verdict of unlawful killing -- SALISBURY, England (AFP)
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