Citizen Protection Minister Yiannis Oikonomou and Deputy Sports Minister Yiannis Vroutsis will visit the Prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Georgia Adeilinis today at noon at 12 and will request on behalf of the Government the criminal upgrading of the investigation for all cases of sports violence and corruption with in order to search for physical and moral perpetrators of all the crimes that have been committed and to search for the existence of any criminal organizations in the area.

Oikonomou and Vroutsis will provide all the evidence available to the authorities for evaluation in the context of the investigative process.

According to government sources, the process of combating and eradicating the phenomena of violence inside and outside the playing fields is expected to resemble “Golden Dawn model“, i.e. the process that uncovered the pro-Nazi party and revealed its criminal activity.

“We will request that this case be examined like criminal gang activitywith interconnections, not only with phenomena of fan violence but with a series of criminal behaviors covering wider issues: drug trafficking, protections, connections with extreme political organizationsparticipation in strange gangs and mafias – and with a deep history that will not even cover 2, 3 or 6 months or 1 year, but will go much further back to murders and to persons whose presence, despite the fact that it was marked there, it was and is still being marked in the sports arenas and in the fan ecosystem” said the Minister of Citizen Protection, Yiannis Oikonomou, to ANT1

In addition, he underlined that a re-examination of a series of cases will be requested which will help the authorities to deal with (both in terms of the physical, but possibly also the moral perpetrators) all this escalation of criminal activity by these gangs of hooligans.

The event underlines the government’s zero tolerance for such phenomena but also emphasizes the importance given by the government and is described by government officials as a “pivotal move for the developments that will follow”.

Read in detail: Zero tolerance for fan violence – The government’s next steps

The weight of the investigations and the new measures announced by the government is to expose those who finance, incite and use the “follower” armies to serve their own ends.