Unanimously guilty for the murder of his wife and her grandmother with an arsenic, the 51-year-old AUTH lecturer was judged by the Mixed Jury Court of Appeal of Thessaloniki.

The judges of the Court of Appeal, regular and lay, with their verdict they did not differentiate from the decision of the trial court which had found him guilty of manslaughter, serially.

The process continues with the defense attorneys asking the court to recognize the defendant’s leniency, expecting to “break” the sentence of two life sentences that had been imposed on their client at first instance.

Grandmother and granddaughter they died in August 2013, after hospitalization at the Papanikolaou Hospital in Thessaloniki, although arsenic poisoning was not initially confirmed. First the elderly woman died, who was hospitalized for a short time, and a few days later her granddaughter. Suspicions of death by poisoning were confirmed by the results of extensive laboratory tests and the exhumation of the bodies.

The 51-year-old lecturer was charged and remanded in custody in January 2016, while two years later – in March 2018 – he was unanimously convicted by the Criminal Court of Thessaloniki.

The unprecedented case in the country’s criminal and police annals reached the Court of Appeal last December, with the defendant insisting on his innocence, characterizing the charges baseless and unproven.