Three officers of the Greek Armed Forces were allegedly sexually molesting a 5-year-old boy for three years, court documents revealed.
According to the documents, the victim, the son of one of the suspects, who are brothers, was sexually abused between 2013-2016. The father of the child and his two uncles abused him countless times, while the documents revealed they would extinguish cigarettes on his body.
In 2019, by a decision of the Judicial Council of the Athens Court of Appeals (Military Court), the three officers were referred to trial for a series of offenses related to sexual abuse and serial rape, etc. at the expense of a minor. However, the Criminal Division of the Supreme Court overturned the referral panel and remanded it for a new trial.
The father of the five-year-old boy, a sergeant in the tank division, had been estranged from his wife since 2014 and according to a decision of the Court of First Instance, he exercised the right to communicate with his son. Thus, at predetermined intervals, especially on Christmas, Easter, and other holidays, the sergeant had his son with him, either at his paternal home in Thessaly or at his home in Piraeus.
In June 2016, his mother noticed a round mark on the child’s arm as if a cigarette had been extinguished on him, while the child would have nightmares shouting in his sleep: “Enough, I can not take it anymore.”
The next morning, his mother saw a wound on his ankle, and when she asked him how he got it, the little boy said that his father threw him, and when asked if he had done anything else to him, the boy replied that his father did more. things with his “tail”, the term the three suspects used to describe his backside.
Answering other questions of his mother, the little boy mentioned that both his father and his uncles, one after the other, on the same day, “open my mouth with both hands and it hurts me” and put, “the urethra in my mouth. ” And he continued, emphasizing that “they laugh” and “these things happened countless times”.
The documents revealed the three had threatened the child that “they will kill the grandmother and beat her if he says anything”. He repeated his experiences during sessions (examinations) with psychologists, child psychologists, medical examiners, etc., while there was a child psychiatric expert, in order to verify whether what the child was telling was a reality or a figment of his imagination.
Indicative of the psychological and physical violence he received at the age of five is that during the meetings with the psychologists, he said: “I cried. I was trying to speak but they shut my mouth.” When asked by psychologists when all three did everything the child described, the answer was: “This happened many, countless times.” All the expert scientists concluded that the child is talking about experiential events.
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court overturned the referral panel for lack of legal reasoning and referred it for a new hearing in the Military Court.