The former highly ranked official of the National Intelligence Service Kostas Aggelakis was found innocent by majority vote by the Three Member Court of Appeals yesterday; he had been accused of espionage and illegal defalcation of documents.

The bench prosecutor proposed his acquittal and the court deemed him innocent by majority vote. In any case, he had refused these charges from the start and had attributed his indictment to a conspiracy and in-service expediency.

At first instance, the Three Member Court of Misdemeanours of Athens imposed a sentence of 18-month imprisonment for espionage and 4-month imprisonment for defalcation of documents. In accordance with the committal order, the former chief of the First Department of Intelligence had illegally withheld secret documents of the National Intelligence Service concerning the national security. In April 2010 an investigation on him was under way, after information had arisen according to which he possessed thousands of secret documents that contained information beyond his jurisdiction.

He himself purports to have argued that the documents he kept in a file cabinet in his office were personal documents, as well as documents of the syndicalist organization of the National Intelligence Service over which he presided for many years. However, after an investigation conducted by the Greek Police, it was concluded that indeed there were secret documents in the file cabinets of the accused, most of which should not have been in his possession, since he was not the competent officer to retain them.

Source: Kathimerini