Extradited

by Andrew Symeou

  ‘So what do you think of London, great city, eh?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, we went to Buckingham Palace and Big Ben, we saw it all!’ the officer next to me responded in perfect English. ‘I was looking at your Facebook group, you have thousands of supporters!’ he said.

  ‘I saw your sister speaking on YouTube,’ the evil-eyed officer inputted.

  ‘Yes, I saw that too,’ the officer next to me said. ‘You know, it won’t be eighteen months in jail. I think maximum three months and you will come back home,’ he said casually.

  Three months! I thought. I couldn’t bear thinking about what could happen in three whole months.

  ‘We’ll see,’ I responded while taking a big gulp from the bottle of water that I’d bought before boarding. There was an awkward pause for a few moments.

  ‘You know, not all Greek police are like them,’ the officer next to me said.

  I was quite shocked by the comment.

  ‘Of course not. They ruin it for all of you, now you all have a bad reputation!’ I said. The evil-eyed man and the officer next to me both smiled; the one in front had already fallen asleep before the plane had even taken off.

  ‘You’re right,’ the officer next to me said. ‘It’s like the policeman who shot the fifteen-year-old boy in the riots in Athens a few months ago as well. They are all arseholes.’

  I’d forgotten about the story that was all over the news. A Greek police officer had shot a fifteen-year-old boy at pointblank range and the Greek public had been protesting.

  The plane began to head slowly towards the runway. The engine roared and we began to shake. Before I knew it, the plane began to accelerate. My head pounded with tension, I shut my eyes and massaged my temples to try to release the pain. The friction between the plane’s wheels and hard runway stopped – I knew that the next time the wheels touched the ground I’d be in Greece.

  I can visualise my extradition so vividly even though it feels like an eternity ago. I had no idea where I was going to be taken, how I was going to be treated, how I would feel or how long it would take for me to finally clear my name and go back home to my family. Despite the many ‘unknowns’, there was one thing I could be sure of: it was going to take a great amount of inner strength to endure whatever was to come.

  I’d been battling for justice like I’d never battled before, and I felt like I’d already been through so much. In truth, it was just the beginning.

  * * *

  PART II

  * * *

  You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.

  – Marcus Aurelius

  23 July 2009, the Daily Telegraph

  STUDENT ACCUSED OF GREECE NIGHTCLUB KILLING EXTRADITED

  Andrew Symeou, a student accused of killing British teenager Jonathan Hiles in a Greek nightclub, was extradited on Thursday. Symeou denies the allegations and says he was not even in the nightclub at the time of the alleged attack on Mr Hiles.

  Mr Symeou, 20, from Enfield, north London, is accused of manslaughter following the death of Mr Hiles in a nightclub in Zakynthos on the island of Zante in 2007.

  He fought the extradition, with his lawyers saying the evidence against him was fabricated and obtained by Greek police through the violent intimidation of witnesses.

  Symeou denies the allegations and says he was not even in the nightclub at the time of the alleged attack on Mr Hiles, 18, from Llandaff North, Cardiff.

  Earlier this year he failed in his bid to get the High Court to refuse his extradition under a European Arrest Warrant.

  He won permission to take his appeal to the House of Lords but the Law Lords last week refused to hear the case.

  Symeou flew to Greece from Heathrow Airport on Thursday morning after surrendering to police at Belgravia Police Station in central London.

  Campaigners against Symeou’s extradition fear he could be held in jail for months before the case is heard. Symeou himself has said he is worried he will be beaten by police.

  Jago Russell, chief executive of Fair Trials International, which is supporting Symeou, said: ‘It is a tragedy that, despite the serious flaws in the case against him, Andrew Symeou has been sent to Greece.

  ‘We hope the Greek courts will do a better job of delivering justice than the British and that this young man will not be forced to spend months in Greek jail before his case even comes to court.’

  His father, Frank, said the time spent fighting his son’s extradition had given the family the opportunity to gather information about the case against him and challenge the evidence held by Greek police.

  ‘Without this extra time, Andrew may by now have been in a Greek prison convicted of a crime he did not commit, based on evidence obtained by torture and that had been fabricated and manipulated by the investigating police officers.

  ‘Andrew is ready to face his accusers, confident in the fact that he is innocent and that the case against him has no foundation in truth.

  ‘This whole nightmare has tested Andrew in ways that most of us could not imagine. Yes, it has been extremely difficult for him and the stress has taken its toll, but he has shown great courage and strength of character.’

  Symeou is charged with striking roller-hockey player Mr Hiles hard in the face, causing him to lose consciousness and fall off a dance podium at the Rescue nightclub in Zakynthos while on holiday in July 2007.

  Mr Hiles, who represented the Great Britain roller-hockey team and also played ice hockey for Cardiff Devils’ junior team, suffered a severe brain injury and died two days later.

  Symeou, a Bournemouth University student, said he did not know of Mr Hiles’s death until he returned to England and was never interviewed by the police.

  His lawyers allege that two of his friends who remained on Zante were held for eight hours without food or water and beaten, punched, slapped and threatened by officers until they gave statements implicating him in the death.

  The pair immediately retracted the statements on their release and informed consular officials about the treatment they received.

  13

  * * *

  THINKING OF YOU

  * * *

  I could see mountains beneath me as I stared through the aircraft’s small window. It was slightly smudged from where my head had been leaning on it. Ding – the seat belt sign lit up; I looked down and realised that it had been fastened for the entire flight. The plane began its descent and I’d never dreaded anything as much as I dreaded that landing. Everything that I’d feared for the previous thirteen months was coming true, and floating in mid-air for an eternity was a better, but far less realistic option.

  ‘What’s gonna happen to me?’ I asked one of the officers.

  ‘Well, there will be some policemen waiting for you who will take you to the police station. At some point you will be taken to Patras. After that, I don’t know,’ he answered.

  Peering out of the window, I watched Athens get closer and closer. I buried my face in my hands as the aeroplane’s wheels hit the runway. When the plane slowed down and came to a halt, I looked out of the window and saw five police cars and a police van on the ground. There must have been at least seven uniformed police officers holding machine guns. They stood in a row and sported the same intimidating posture: legs in line with their shoulders, machine guns held in both hands from bottom right to top left, loaded and ready to use.

  A bout of nerves ran through my body. ‘Are they all here for me!?’ I asked the officer next to me in surprise.

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ he answered.

  ‘Will they handcuff me?’

  ‘I’ll ask them not to, don’t worry, they are good guys. They are funny!’ he said.

  I appreciated the fact that he was trying to comfort me, but I wasn’t comforted at all. They were there to lock me up, and I didn’t expect them to be telling any jokes.

  Passengers on the aeroplane exited first, all of whom were totally oblivious that there was a
person on board under arrest. When the plane emptied, the officers who I’d flown with stood me up and walked me towards the back door of the aeroplane. Two of the armed officers from the ground had boarded the plane. The officer next to me opened his mouth as though he was about to speak to them, but the armed officers didn’t give him the chance to say anything. Within a few moments they’d cuffed me and dragged me down the stairs that led to the ground. It all happened so quickly – my heart was pounding. As soon as I stepped off the plane I was overwhelmed by the sweltering heat – it must have been forty degrees. There was no breeze, just hot, petrol-fumed air. They pulled me down the steps so quickly that I almost fell over.

  When we reached the ground, the officer slid open the side door of the small police van that was parked in between two police cars. He pushed me into a cage in the back of the vehicle and slammed the gate shut. He pulled open a rectangular section of the cage door.

  ‘Ela – Come,’ he said.

  Luckily I could get by with basic Greek. I turned around and he gestured for me to put my hands through the gap so that he could take the handcuffs off me.

  There were two short rows of metal benches and an old man smoking a cigarette was sitting on one of them. I sat on the bench in front of him and then closed my eyes, taking a deep breath of the warm, smoke-filled air. Only a little bit of light shone into the van through a few small holes.

  The van’s engine turned on and the whole vehicle began to vibrate. The man put his hand on my shoulder and said something in Greek that I couldn’t understand – he was speaking too fast. I turned around and looked at him. He initially appeared to be old, but I saw he was probably only in his fifties when I had a closer look. He looked like a frail, broken man with balding grey hair, and the few teeth he had were yellow and crooked.

  ‘Pos se lene? – What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Andro,’ I told him, which is what my grandparents have always called me. His facial expression told me that he was confused.

  ‘Eisai Ellinas reh? – Are you Greek boy?’ I understood.

  I told him I was a Greek Cypriot from London and that my Greek wasn’t very good at all.

  ‘Andro? This name is not Greek!’ he said to me in English. ‘To onoma sou einai Andreas! – Your name is Andreas!’ he said.

  ‘Andro … yeah, it’s Cypriot I guess.’

  He pointed to himself as a child would before an introduction. ‘Yiannis Economou,’ he said. I remember the name because it sounded Cypriot and like the word ‘economy’. From what I understood, Yiannis was serving a twenty-year sentence for trafficking cocaine.

  ‘Pou pas? – Where’re you going?’ he asked.

  ‘Patra,’ I told him.

  ‘Ahhhh,’ he said, then tutted.

  My stomach sank as soon as he began to tut. ‘Ti? – What?’ I questioned.

  ‘Tha sas gamisoun stin Patra! – They’re going to fuck you in Patras!’ he said.

  ‘No no,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No fucking!’

  ‘Dekapente hronia ekana stin Patra fylaki – I did fifteen years in Patras Prison,’ he blurted while holding up his hands and gesturing ten, then five. ‘Deka pente! – Fifteen!’ he said, smiling and exposing his few nicotine-stained teeth.

  ‘Only police station, no prison!’ I said in broken English. I attempted to help him understand with hand gestures, but I don’t think that he did.

  The journey to the Athens transfer jail could have been forty minutes, in which time I’d become drenched in my own sweat and dehydrated. When we arrived, a policeman slid open the van door and let us out of the cage. An officer grabbed my arm and handcuffed me before stepping out onto the concrete floor. I looked up and noticed that we were in some kind of underground car park. I had my blue Nike sports bag around my shoulder, some money in my pocket and my mobile phone, just in case I found the opportunity to call my family. They escorted both of us up a flight of stairs, where we were made to stand in a corridor. For the first time, I stood before a group of Greek police officers. After fighting the extradition for over a year and knowing what the police were capable of, standing there was surreal. They placed my bag on the floor, then they frisked me and took my mobile phone, my money and box of medication.

  ‘Ti ora? – What time?’ I understood him asking.

  ‘Octo – Eight,’ I replied.

  A skinny officer took a pull of his cigarette and said something that I didn’t understand while pointing at my bag. I used my initiative, opened it up and took out some clothes, an empty journal, a biro pen and the envelope Riya had given me. He grabbed my arm and escorted me to the end of the hallway, and Yiannis Economou was taken in the other direction. On the left-hand side was a barred gate.

  ‘Anixe! – Open!’ the officer shouted. I remember his colleague taking ages to acknowledge him. This seemed to irritate him. ‘Anixe, reh vlaka! – Open, you idiot!’ There was a buzzing and clunking sound, which unlocked the gate for a few moments. He pulled it open and pushed me in, shutting the gate behind me.

  I stood at the top of a long, thin corridor looking at a cracked, concrete floor and large barred windows along the right side. Jitters ran through me because I could hear men talking and shouting. They emitted the foul stench of a used ashtray and body odour, which lingered in the stuffy heat. On the left were five cells next to each other. I looked into the first cell, which was empty. In it there were five concrete beds, a few of which had thin mattresses to sleep on. Some of them were made of broken-up yellow sponge, but some were covered with a dirty green material – it looked disgusting. I looked back at the officer behind me, catching him just before he walked down the hallway. I was about to open my mouth to ask him which cell I should go into when he said, ‘Opou thelis – Whichever you want.’

  As I walked past the second cell, I could see in my peripheral vision that it was full of men, which made me anxious. The doors of the cells were unlocked, so we were free to walk up and down the hallway. I walked into the next empty cell and I hoped that no one would come in. It was the first time that I’d been alone since I’d landed in Greece, and the first thing that I did was sit on one of the concrete blocks and hold the brown envelope that Riya had given me. I took a deep breath and slowly opened it, sliding out a photograph of us together. We were both smiling, both happy – we had no worries in the world back then. I welled up, but smiled to myself because it meant so much to me. I turned the photograph around and she had written ‘thinking of you’ on the back. My heart melted as I read the words – I lost my face in my hands and there were quiet tears.

  14

  * * *

  DAY 1

  * * *

  Journal extract – Day 1 – 23 July 2009

  So the journey begins. 5 beds per cell – stinks of stale smoke. Managed to get myself a free cell and hoping no one comes in at any point. There is a big group of prisoners next door to me. Who knows why they are here? I’m scared to even go to the toilet and walk past them. The floor in this cell is disgusting, dirty concrete and looks like compressed ash from the many years of prisoners flicking their cigarettes. Prisoners must have got pretty bored as the walls are covered in writing. One big word ‘ALBANIA’. I wonder where he is from?

  I put down the pen and took a brief moment to look at the writing and pictures that ex-detainees had drawn on the walls. I remember a huge illustration of a naked woman with long hair, lying on her back with her legs apart, touching her vagina. Her arms were out of proportion in comparison to the rest of her body, but other than that it was actually quite a good attempt. It’d been drawn with a blue biro, but the detainee who’d drawn it had managed to give the illusion of her hair flowing in the wind; he’d made a huge effort.

  Someone else had drawn a picture of a skull with hypnotic eyes. Underneath was written ‘so much cocaine in my brain’. The walls were covered in what looked like Arabic, English and some Greek writing. I remember reading a badly spelled poem: ‘Some hate one, some hate tow (I think he meant �
��two’), I hate one, I hate you.’

  The mattresses were covered with a dirty, green material with a few whitish stains – I didn’t want to think about what they were. As much as I beat the mattress with my palm, it wouldn’t stop filling the air with dust. It seemed to be never ending, so I unzipped the cover at the tip of the mattress and pulled out an old, rectangular, yellow sponge. I didn’t have a sheet to cover it, or any kind of pillow. I just lay down, closed my eyes and attempted to unwind, however difficult it proved to be.

  ‘Fileh mou – My friend,’ I heard. I opened my eyes and sat up. A guy, who was probably in his thirties, was standing in the cell with me. ‘Café?’ he asked, holding a Nescafé frappe disposable plastic cup. It was the kind that had sachets of coffee and sugar inside; all you had to do was mix it with a bit of cold water and shake with the lid on to make a cold frothy coffee. I stood up, took the cup and thanked him. He introduced himself as Alex. I remember him offering me a cigarette, which I accepted. He told me that he was an illegal immigrant and was being deported back to Albania in two weeks’ time.

  Journal extract

  I thought I would go and thank them all so I wouldn’t look like a tosser. They ended up inviting me into their cell to drink the coffee and smoke. I just about got by with my little Greek. They didn’t seem aggressive in any way. I am officially nicknamed ‘o Anglos’ (Englishman). I’m wearing an England T-shirt as well to top it off. Who knows, I could have been sitting in a room full of paedophiles, rapists and murderers – but my guess is drugs.