Extradited (25 page)

Of course I’d made an effort to witness all the beauty that Athens had to offer. Riya flew over to stay with me and we walked up to the Acropolis and took a day trip to Poseidon’s Temple (which was very similar to the Parthenon, only it was miles away from Athens and took
hours
to get there and back). I’ve always been intrigued by ancient Greek civilisation, and the temple ruins exuded history and culture.

It was amazing for us to be together again. I remember the day she’d landed in Athens; I’d taken a bus to the airport to meet her. I don’t know why, but I was filled with nerves and had to take a Xanax to relax. My nerves turned into joy when I finally held her in my arms again, then we spent the entire bus ride to the apartment laughing and joking. It was as though we hadn’t been
apart at all. We just fitted back together again, like two pieces of a puzzle.

We took a boat trip to a Saronic island called Aegina – only 17 miles off the coast of Athens. We stayed there for a few nights and it was such an incredible feeling. Sunbathing on a mountain cliff with my girlfriend next to me, and watching the shimmering, blue sea was like being in heaven in comparison to prison. At times I couldn’t even believe that it was real. The trip eventually came to an end and she had to go back to north London. I travelled with her to the airport and walked her to the departures gate. Our eyes began to stream because I had to let her go – all over again.

My bail conditions stated that I had to sign in at the police station every month, which was a ridiculous task. I’d travel to my assigned police station on the Metro, but when I’d arrive there the documentation would be lost and the officers wouldn’t know what to do! The officers would supposedly call up another police station and tell me that I’d have to go there – so I’d travel across Athens and be told exactly the same thing. It was so frustrating, and the very first time I was even given a blank sheet of paper to sign. There wasn’t any information written on the document whatsoever, and it was probably going to get lost or thrown straight into the bin. Why did I have to waste entire days to complete a pointless task that should have been so easy to achieve? The months were passing slowly and, regardless of the frustration I’d face, I’d still turn up at the police station on the days when I was supposed to. I didn’t want to give the authorities anything at all to use against me in court. I jumped through every hoop that they asked of me – however exhausting it was.

I had no clue as to when my next court date would be set. It was assumed that it would only be a few months, but five had passed and I still didn’t know when I could clear my name and return home.

We ended up waiting nine months for the trial to start – and what a trial it was.

T
he trial was set to begin in Patras on 4 March 2011, so we found two studio apartments online to rent for the duration. I overheard my mum sitting at her computer and choking up with emotion. The landlord, Eugenia Siozos, had emailed us saying that she’d read about my case online. She thought it was so unjust that she offered us the studio apartments free of charge. It was the nicest, most selfless thing that anyone had ever done for my family and me. My dad was losing his business and my parents’ life savings were being spent on legal fees – to then be offered something so generous was overwhelming. My mum couldn’t thank her enough, but insisted that we pay. Eugenia refused to accept any money! My parents reluctantly accepted (but had already planned to give the Siozos family a monetary ‘gift’ at some stage).

Eugenia and her husband, Dimitris, were the nicest people you could possibly imagine. They didn’t even know us but invited my family to dinner, and I spent quite a bit of time playing video games with their son Vasilis on a few occasions.

Before I met the Siozos family, I’d started thinking cynically about humanity. But these complete strangers had been so kind to us. They did more than offer us somewhere to live:
they reminded us that there is beauty and goodness in the world after all.

I splashed my face with water then heaved over the toilet. There was a churning feeling of sickness in my stomach; it was the day that I’d been anticipating for almost three years. I got changed into my suit, meticulously; I had to look as perfect as possible. I fastened and unfastened my tie repeatedly until I was almost late. My mobile phone rang: ‘Hurry up!’ I heard my sister’s voice screeching.

‘All right, all right. Relax!’

It was a top-floor apartment so I took the lift down to the ground floor. The entire back wall of the lift was a mirror and I looked at my reflection as the lift descended. I was such a
big
guy; I’d really let myself go, and I felt like my appearance didn’t reflect my true nature. There were dark, grey circles around my eyes – almost like a panda’s. I looked drained, unhealthy and bloated.

The lift door opened and I saw my family standing before me. My dad threw his arms around my shoulders and patted me on the back. ‘Ready?’

‘Yeah.’ I replied. ‘The beginning of the end.’

‘The beginning of your life,’ my mum added.

My grandma grabbed onto my arm as we made our way to the courthouse. The apartment was only a few blocks away so we could walk there in a few minutes. It was a lovely day – early – so the air was cool. The sky burst with sunshine, which was a warning that I’d be sweating through my suit later.

Entering the court with my family was a completely different feeling from going to court in handcuffs. When I’d been taken
to court directly from prison I’d actually felt far less anxious and sick because I saw it as my chance to be released from prison. My family gave me great strength, but now – nine months later – I was facing going
back
to prison, and for a very long time. I was confident that I would clear my name, but judging from the previous three years, I knew that absolutely anything could happen. Prison for twenty years was something that I couldn’t even bear to imagine. This trial was the most important thing that would ever happen to me – it was a fight for my life.

I approached the court and a journalist pointed a camera in my face and followed me. ‘Andrew! Did you urinate on Jonathan?’

‘No.’

‘Did you punch Jonathan, Andrew?’ he asked excitedly.

‘No.’ It was so frustrating because I was caught by surprise. I didn’t want to say anything else – I was far too nervous and it wouldn’t have come out properly. All I wanted was for the trial to finally start so that the truth could unfold.

I sat down on the defendant’s bench towards the front of the courtroom. It faced where the counsel panel would sit, but the judges and jurors were yet to walk into the room through a side door. Right above where they would sit was a large, slightly wonky icon of Jesus Christ on the back wall. A figure that represents ‘divine justice’ for so many people around the world was crooked. It made me feel uneasy; ‘crooked justice’. I wanted someone to climb up there and straighten it!

I could feel the presence of the victim’s family metres behind me. I forced myself to focus on the portrait and held my friend Michael’s cross in my hands for good luck; it had been with me throughout my time in prison too.

The counsel panel walked in and everyone present in the room stood up. My heart fluttered – the president judge asked everyone to sit and began to fill the room with the echoing projection of
her voice. She read out the prosecution witness register. For the first time, Chris Kyriacou, Charlie Klitou and all five of Jonathan Hiles’s friends were present in the courtroom.

The Hiles family had decided to appoint a lawyer, who needed some time to review the case. It was, of course, their right to have legal representation, especially in a foreign land where they didn’t understand the system. A Greek criminal trial is conducted in a completely different way from one in the UK; the public prosecutor sits next to the counsel bench and asks questions along with the judges and jurors.

The Hiles family’s lawyer asked for an adjournment so that he could review the case – but it didn’t worry me in the slightest. I wanted a fair trial, and I didn’t want there to be any reason for people to think that it wasn’t. The fact that they’d hired a lawyer was a good thing; I was hoping that they’d
finally
take a look at the shoddy investigation into their son’s death. Surely they would acknowledge the serious flaws in it, which my family had tried to show them three years earlier.

The first day in court lasted only an hour and it was adjourned for a further six days – to 10 March.

We returned on 10 March, but the trial ended after forty-five minutes because the translator appointed by the court could hardly speak English. Her English was nowhere near strong enough to translate an entire homicide trial.

I sat on the defendant’s bench with the translator sitting to my left. The clerk read out the charge, which I’d already read in English several times. The translator then leaned forward to listen with a confused expression etched across her face. Imagine the mum from the movie
My Big Fat Greek Wedding:
a heavy-set woman with puffy hair who looked like she’d come straight from the hairdressers. She raised her hand towards my face to stop me from making any distracting noises and then began to whisper
in my ear in her thick Greek accent. ‘You was very high up and something happened. Then you hits a boy on his head, and he falls, and then he dies … or something like that.’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; I was on trial for my life and the woman couldn’t even translate the charge! Seventy-five per cent of the vital information had been left out of her translation and it wasn’t at all what the document said. She seemed like a very nice lady, but I had no choice but to raise my hand and tell the judges that the translation wasn’t good enough. I felt bad because the woman was sitting right next to me, but the translation had to be completely flawless. The judge asked me a question and the translator whispered into my ear, ‘You would like a new translator?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’

She smiled. ‘It’s OK
agapi mou
– my love.’

The court staff faffed around; they used their mobile phones to contact translators who may have been available on the day. In the end they brought in a lawyer from another courtroom to translate for a little while; they may as well have run around the courthouse screaming, ‘
Does anybody speak English!? Somebody!? Anybody!?
’ No official translators were immediately available, so the trial was adjourned until 17 March (seven days later) and on 17 March there was a lawyers’ strike, so it was further pushed back to 22 March. Almost three weeks had passed and the long-awaited trial hadn’t even started yet.

A
ccording to the trial transcript, the British embassy had recommended a translator called Theo Buchelos. He could speak seven languages, which flew through his lips as though each of them were his mother tongue. Theo could hear one language and almost simultaneously translate it with hardly any thought process – it was very impressive. The court appointed him and the trial finally commenced on 22 March 2011.

Mark O’Gorman (the only eyewitness to the alleged attack) was the first of the victim’s friends to testify. I’d often been lying on my prison cell bunk, thinking about what he’d already said to the South Wales Police. He made it very clear that a punch was thrown, but that he was not 100 per cent sure of the attacker’s identity. I was looking forward to his cross-examination.

He strolled past me on my left and then stood at the wooden lectern facing the counsel panel. Mark was slightly chubby, with scruffy brown hair and glasses.

Before starting his testimony, he took a sip of drinking water and placed the half-finished bottle at his feet.

His description of the hours building up to the incident was consistent with the detailed statement that he’d made to the South Wales Police in 2007: it was his first night in Zante – he
and his immediate group of friends had a few drinks in the hotel bar. Mark headed to the main ‘strip’ of bars and nightclubs with his friends Jason Mordecai, Robert Hares and Christopher Paglionico at around 11.15 p.m. They sat outside the Rescue club, where Jonathan Hiles and Lee Burgess met them some time later. The group of six boys entered the dance area of the nightclub.

Mark explained that at around 1.00 or 1.30 a.m., he and his friends were dancing on a podium, which stood at around 5 feet. Mark said that he ‘felt something wet’ on him and thought that it may have been a drink that someone had spilt. ‘I turned and saw Andrew Symeou urinating on the stage,’ Mark said.

I was absolutely outraged and had to grind my teeth to stop myself from a hysterical outburst. I couldn’t believe my ears! The moment I heard him say my name in his testimony, I realised why they’d flown almost 2,000 miles from Cardiff to Greece. They weren’t in court to discover whether I was the attacker or not; it seemed like they were there for a guilty verdict. I wanted to jump out of my seat and call him every derogatory name under the sun – but that wouldn’t have helped me at all. With each word he spoke, I became more and more furious.

‘Andrew then punched Jonathan with his right hand, hitting Jonathan on his left cheek.’

After everything that I’d gone through and everything that we’d fought for, hearing my name being slandered in a court of law was devastating and shocking. I knew that it was a possibility – but I didn’t anticipate such a fearless and malicious testimony from a person who had already admitted that he was unsure.

Mark explained that the force of the punch caused Jonathan to stumble back and fall off the stage. ‘Andrew’ was in the company of two other males and Mark said that he remembered one having light hair.

I could feel myself shaking with anger. My attention quickly
transferred to my lawyer George Pyromallis and his assistant Vanessa who were both sitting on the right-hand side of the courtroom. George gave a cynical smile and nodded. ‘OK, OK,’ he mouthed. George wasn’t expecting Mark O’Gorman to implicate me as the attacker, especially with such certainty. It completely contradicted his statement made to the South Wales Police.

My attention switched to the back of Mark O’Gorman, who was still giving evidence. Mark was asked to turn around and look me in the eyes. ‘Are you 100 per cent sure this man was the person who attacked your friend?’ the prosecuting lawyer asked him.

Mark turned his head to the side and glanced at me behind him. Our eyes met: mine were wide and stared in astonishment; his flicked away after a fraction of a second. ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ he told the court.

I’m finding it difficult to describe the feeling. A completely random person was trying to destroy my entire life. I’d never felt such rage before; my heart was beating at at least four times a healthy speed. I turned my head to the right and looked behind me where my family and Riya were sitting. Her jaw had dropped and she shook her head in disgust. It seemed as though none of us knew how to digest the sudden turn of events. It was such a devastating shock.

When I was on holiday in Zante, in 2007, I had a thick moustache and beard that was shaped with a razor – my sideburns met at my chin, and my lip and entire chin were covered in facial hair. No witnesses mentioned this distinctive feature in their statements made to South Wales Police, and in the Greek word-for-word identical statements that they had all signed, it stated: ‘I wish to point out that the perpetrator had shaved off his goatee on the day of the incident and had left only slightly long sideburns.’ Through what we had been exposing in the media, my appearance on the night in question was now common knowledge.

When asked to describe my appearance, Mark O’Gorman told the court that he remembers me having long sideburns – but demonstrated with his hands on his own face that the sideburns met at the chin.

The expression on the president judge’s face made it obvious that she was confused. She asked Mark to confirm whether the attacker had sideburns. ‘Or was there facial hair covering his chin?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘So he had a full beard? A goatee and a moustache?’

‘Yes,’ he twitched.

Mark told the court that after Jonathan’s death, he and his four friends had sat with a professional photographer in Laganas Police Station. All five of them (together) looked through photographs on a laptop, which were of people partying in the Rescue nightclub – the night before Jonathan was attacked: ‘When we were looking at the photographs, my friend Christopher Paglionico said, “There he is [the attacker]”, then Jason Mordecai later said, “Let’s look at that one again.” Everyone recognised him and I have no doubt that it was the man in the photograph.’

Mark also mentioned being shown CCTV of the Rescue nightclub from the time of the incident, where three males were seen running out of the establishment.

George Pyromallis began his cross-examination with the question: ‘Are you familiar with the term
perjury?
’

‘Yes, I know what it is.’

‘In the statement you made to the Greek police you said, “I wish to point out that the perpetrator had shaved off his goatee on the day of the incident and had left only slightly long sideburns” – why is that?’ George probed.

We’d been exposing the Greek word-for-word statements as flawed and fabricated for three years. It was a complete surprise,
but they were suddenly of some use to us! The fact that they said the guy was clean-shaven must have come from somewhere.

Mark O’Gorman claimed that he hadn’t told the Zante police that the perpetrator was clean-shaven. It was lost in translation and he told the Zante police to ‘keep an open mind’ – ‘Andrew may have shaved off his beard after the attack and I told the police that they shouldn’t only look out for people with facial hair,’ he said.

It was an absurd suggestion to make. It was a known fact to them that I’d already left the island, hence I was not present in the police station, but my two friends were.

He continued, ‘I remember mentioning sideburns, but I was tired from being in the hospital with Jonny [Jonathan] when I made that statement and I can’t really remember.’

George honed in on the fact that there was no mention of facial hair in his South Wales Police statement either – or any of his friends’ statements, all of which were made in 2007. Mark’s answer was, ‘I didn’t say he had facial hair, and I didn’t say that he didn’t.’

‘Why didn’t you mention it in the statement?’ George asked.

‘When I made the statement with the police officer in Wales he mainly asked me about Andrew’s clothing. It was question and answer – and he didn’t ask the question,’ said Mark.

George shook his head. ‘In your statement to the police in Wales you gave a description of the male: “He was about five foot nine inches tall with short dark brown hair. He was white but well-tanned. He was wearing a blue polo shirt with collars turned up and I think dark or brown shorts and trainers”– are you telling this court that the police officer asked you each of these specific details and you confirmed them? Are you saying that the officer even asked
you
if the attacker had his
collars turned up!?
Do you not think it’s more likely that the officer asked you to describe
what the person looked like? You gave this detailed description voluntarily, didn’t you?’

‘I just answered the questions,’ he said.

‘It’s quite a detailed description; you even mentioned that his collars were turned up. You gave
thirteen pages of testimony
and you decided not to mention the most obvious identifying feature!?’ George thundered.

‘I didn’t think it was important,’ Mark O’Gorman mumbled.

‘But the collars were more important to mention!? The collars were more important than the attacker having distinctive facial hair!?’

After a two-hour testimony, George Pyromallis questioned:

‘I wasn’t 100 per cent sure then, but I’m 100 per cent sure now,’ he mumbled.

Christopher Paglionico was the next prosecution witness to testify – another schoolfriend of Jonathan Hiles.

A Mediterranean-looking guy approached the lectern; he had a darker tone to his skin and short, dark brown hair. Similarly to Mark O’Gorman’s testimony, he looked me in the eye and told the court that he was 100 per cent certain I was the person who had attacked his friend, even though he openly admitted that he didn’t see the incident. Christopher stated that he’d seen ‘me’ drunk and unstable for ‘four or five seconds’ and was about 6 feet away.

He said, ‘It was dark, but there was enough light to recognise
his face.’ Christopher told the court that he saw ‘Andrew’ urinating near his party who were dancing on the stage. He went to the nightclub’s toilet to clean up; during this period the alleged attack had occurred. Mark later told him that the perpetrator was the man who’d been urinating.

Christopher Paglionico gave very similar reasons to Mark O’Gorman when questioned about the inconsistencies between his statements made to Greek and South Wales Police in 2007. He stated that in Greece, all of his friends mentioned facial hair to the police, but it all must have been lost in translation: ‘I said from the very beginning that he had a beard, to both the police in Greece and in Wales. I even told the police officer in Wales that Andrew had an “artistic beard”, I don’t know why she hadn’t written it down.’

Like Mark O’Gorman, Christopher mentioned seeing CCTV of three men running out of the nightclub and was given the ‘impression that they were escaping from something’. He later stated that he and his immediate group of friends witnessed a series of photographs on a laptop in the Zante Police Station, but couldn’t recall how many:

Since being released from prison, my anxiety on a day-to-day basis had lessened because I was around people who were constantly remaining positive. But as soon as I discovered what we
were up against, the anxiety came flooding back and I indulged in drugs like Xanax. Suddenly we were fighting two battles – not only against the shoddy Greek investigation, but against the victim’s friends too.

There was a stressful two-week break between court days, and I was finding it very difficult to cope with the shocking turn of events. How could we possibly take on everyone? I struggled to sleep because I would be thinking about it and tormenting myself – I actually had a better night’s sleep in prison surrounded by cockroaches.

The only thing keeping me going was the knowledge that I was an innocent man, and I believed that the judges saw the truth – surely.

The next day in court was 6 April. As soon as the trial continued, George Pyromallis lodged a perjury lawsuit against Mark O’Gorman and Christopher Paglionico. Mr Hiles’s lawyer proposed that this was a tactic to intimidate the three remaining friends of Jonathan Hiles, who were all present in the courtroom to hear the announcement. I guess there was some truth to this, because I wanted them to fear the consequences of their empty words. Mark O’Gorman and Christopher Paglionico didn’t even hesitate to add distinctive facial hair to the alleged attacker. The details of my defence had been exposed in the media. Photographs of me taken on the holiday had been plastered all over the news and I’d been telling the British judges in my extradition appeal that I had a beard – which the attacker was never described as having. There was evidence that their testimonies had been premeditated in order to ensure a guilty verdict – is that not perjury? It seemed as though they didn’t want the truth; they wanted the person accused to pay.