On November 1, 2010, Panayiotis Argyrou was arrested in Athens alongside Gerasimos Tsakolos during the wave of incendiary package mailings initiated by Fire Cells Consppiracy. Both comrades willingly admitted to their participation in the organisation. Argyrou had been named in the October 2009 arrest warrant charging him with participation in the fire Cells Conspiracy, and he was also awaiting trial for setting fire to a city bus.
On January 16, the first Fire Cells Coonspiracy trial began – the so-called “Halandri case”” – and Argyrou was one of the nine defendants. In protest against the trial conditions, he and three other defendants walked out of the courthouse at the end of January and never returned.
On july 19, the trial ended with the announcement of the verdict and sentenced. Argyrou was found guilty of forming a terrorist organization, manufacturing explosives, possessing explosives, and causing explosions at the Ministry of Macedonia-Thrace, the name of former Interior Vice-Minister Panayiotis Hinofotis, and the home of PASOK minsters Lauka Katseli and Gerasimos Arsenis. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison and of a total combined sentence of 77 years.
About two weeks before the trial ended, he released the following public statement.
(extract)
The following is the political statement I intended to make at the Fire Cells Conspiracy Revolutionary Organization trial that began on January 17, 2011.
Due to the way things unfolded, I decided not to participate in the proceedings and was thus tried in absentia. Nevertheless, I am still relasing this statement because i believe that revolutionary discourse shouldn’t just be limited to courthouse interference. In addition, my abstention from the trial wasn’t a passive act of silence, but a form of political intervention against the measures imposed by the law on political prisoners and those who show solidarity with them.
I have been locked up for the past several months as a prisoner of revolutionary war – a war that seethes relentlessly; a war between revolutionary forces and the decrepit, criminal, authoritarian society we live in; a war that will continue to seethe as long as there are active revolutionaries full of hatred for this world, full of the raging desire for this destruction, full of the passion for freedom………………….
(you can read the complete text: http://conspiracycellsoffire.blogspot.com/)