MEP Giorgios Kyrtsos announced on Wednesday that he was taking Greece to court over alleged intelligence surveillance at the centre of a wiretap scandal.

“I filed a complaint against those responsible,” the member of the European parliament told media on his way out of the Athens prosecutor’s office.

He said his “constitutional and democratic rights are being violated”, expressing indignation that as an MEP he is considered “suspicious and dangerous for the security of my country”.

The complaint by Kyrtsos, a member of the EU parliament’s liberal Renew group, comes five days after the European news website Euractiv reported that he and a Greek investigative journalist were “victims of ‘Greek Watergate,'” an allusion to the 1970s political scandal which brought down then US president Richard Nixon.

The scandal emerged in July when Nikos Androulakis, MEP and leader of the Greek socialist party (Pasok-Kinal), took legal action against an attempt to infiltrate his mobile phone using illegal spyware known as Predator.

After the revelation, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis admitted that state intelligence had monitored Androulakis, without disclosing the reason, but flatly denied authorities used Predator.

The government has strongly denied news reports that dozens of prominent Greeks were under surveillance via Predator, including former prime minister Antonis Samaras, several serving cabinet ministers, military chiefs, media owners and journalists.

Also among those listed was Eva Kaili, a Greek Socialist MEP who has been arrested in Brussels in connection with an alleged corruption scandal in the European Parliament involving Qatar.

Kaili has so far not reacted to her alleged surveillance.

A judicial investigation and a parliamentary inquiry have so far shed no light on the matter.

Kyrtsos was elected to the European Parliament under the banner of Greece’s ruling New Democracy party. But he was expelled from the party in January for criticising the Greek government over freedom of the press issues.

He has since sat as an independent MEP.

Source: AFP