Judges in Greece granted early release Thursday to the leader of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party jailed for a string of crimes including the murder of an anti-fascist rapper a decade ago.

Nikos Michaloliakos was sentenced to 13 and a half years in prison in 2020 as the presumed head of a criminal organisation that attacked immigrants and political opponents.

Crimes tied to the group included the 2013 murders of an anti-fascist rapper and a Pakistani migrant, as well as the beatings of Egyptian fishermen and Communist trade unionists.

The 66-year-old mathematician and Holocaust denier will not be allowed to leave the greater Athens area, said the judges who granted him a conditional release. He must also report to his local police station once a month.

He is also not allowed to come into contact with other people sentenced in the case, the judicial council of the city of Lamia said.

Michaloliakos has not been behind bars since 2022, state news agency ANA said Thursday, having been moved to a rehabilitation centre in west Athens after a serious bout of Covid-19.

A disgraced former officer cadet and devotee of Greek dictator Georgios Papadopoulos, he had already spent time in prison in the late 1970s in connection with a spate of bomb attacks.

He regularly wrote articles for the Golden Dawn website from prison, denouncing his sentence as “political persecution” and rejecting the evidence against him as baseless.

Golden Dawn, a xenophobic and anti-Semitic organisation created by Michaloliakos, was for decades a fringe party until the country’s 2010 debt crisis.

The group then capitalised on public anger over immigration and austerity cuts, entering parliament for the first time in 2012.

At the height of its influence, it was the country’s third biggest party.

The party’s appeal began in 2022 and is ongoing.

Despite its fall, Golden Dawn continues to influence tens of thousands of Greek voters.

The party’s former spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris, who is also serving a 13-and-a-half-year sentence, last year endorsed a previously unknown party, the Spartans, in national elections.

The Spartans picked up over 240,000 votes and won 12 seats in parliament. Their leader later publicly thanked Kasidiaris for “fuelling” their rise.

Source: AFP