A new interruption, for the 15 March, the trial for the rape and brutal murder of Eleni Topaloudi, in November 2018 in Rhodes, which shocked the whole country. This time, the reason for the interruption was the illness with coronavirus a jury of the Joint Court of Appeal and the counsel for the Albanian-origin defendant.
As reported by APE-MPA, the second time that the procedure before the IOE did not proceed caused strong reaction from the mother of Eleni Topaloudi, who started shouting «shame» to the bench.
Present in court today, for support of the family of Eleni Topaloudi, was the Anna Psarakou, mother of Garyfalia who was murdered this summer in Folegandros, but also the Eleni Kremastioti, mother of Eratoumi who was murdered in 2019 in Mytilene by her estranged husband.
Eleni Kremastioti reacted strongly when she heard the prosecutor propose to adjourn the trial. In fact, her reactions provoked the prosecutor's reply «What do you want? To bring them here by covid?».
Earlier, Eleni's mother had reacted strongly to seeing the Greek-born defendant sitting on the witness stand, which in all the halls of the Mixed Jury Courts of Appeal, is at the height of the judges. «I cannot see the killers of my child at the same height as the judges. I, the mother of murdered Helen,» she cried.
It is recalled that the second degree trial for the the gruesome, martyrdom death of the student started on February 14 and after the jury was drawn, it was adjourned for today as the younger of the two defendants had appointed a new lawyer to represent him who requested time to study the case file.
The two defendants have been sentenced toin the first degree to life imprisonment and an additional 15 years' imprisonment. According to the case file, Eleni's almost peers raped her with the threat of a knife and by hitting her wildly on the head with fists and an electric iron and then threw her beaten on a rocky beach in the Lindos area of Rhodes while she was alive and begged them just before they took her to a hospital.
Τthe trial court had not recognised any mitigating circumstances to the two perpetrators of the horrific crime. The parents of Eleni Topaloudi are asking the same from the Court of Appeal, not to change the sentence imposed for the brutal loss of their daughter.
The judges, after examining about ten witnesses and evaluating the defendants' positions and all the material in the case file, will finally decide whether the two young men will return to prison with the same or a reduced sentence.
The position of the defendants, both during the pre-trial and in the court of first instance, is that they had sex with the consent of Eleni Topaloudi and that the situation went wrong when the student praised the erotic performance of one of them, resulting in the instantaneous explosion of the other.
This version was denied both by the judges of the Rhodes Plenary Council who referred them to the court and by the seven members of the Primary Criminal Court who ruled that they were both equally involved in the rape and murder of the 21-year-old girl and in all subsequent actions they took to cover their tracks. «They were in total collusion and complicity with each other, both in the rape and in the killing of the victim» the judgment of the Judicial Council states.
