Psychiko Murder: Killer Shots Man to Death in His Car in Cold Blood

The 54-year-old businessman was shot dead by a gunman on a motorbike in the centre of the upmarket Psychiko district in northern Athens on Tuesday morning. The man, a civil engineer by profession, worked as a land surveyor in Mykonos and elsewhere in the country.

In 2021 Panagiotis Stathis was brutally beaten by unknown assailants while on an inspection tour of Mykonos, a bohemian island in the Aegean Sea.

The businessman was shot more than 20 times at around 8:30 a.m. while he was parking his business partner's car outside their company building. An unknown assailant on a motorcycle opened fire on the victim's car and fled at high speed, apparently having accomplished his mission.

According to state broadcaster ERT, police found at least 20 shell casings at the crime scene, and an audio recording made during the shooting shows the gunman firing a burst, pausing for a few seconds, and then firing a control shot.

The audio recording first shows about 16 shots fired in a row, then there is a pause and the criminal can be heard firing 4 more times.

Media reports say police are investigating the attack, suspecting so-called “Mykonos branch” Greek mafia. According to eyewitnesses and CCTV footage, the attacker was wearing black clothes and a white helmet. According to ANT1, one of the witnesses wrote down the motorcycle's license plate number, while another ran into him “face to face”.

For Greek police, shooting a victim with a pistol is a clear sign of a contract killing. Police investigationas reported, focuses on the business activities of the victim on the island of Mykonos and his partner on the islands of Paros and Ios.

Panagiotis Stathis worked in Mykonos several jobs, had a very good reputation, did not appear to be involved in suspicious activity, and had no criminal record. He had been conducting surveying work for major projects on the island, having worked there since 2000. In 2021, the victim was physically assaulted on the island of Mykonos, where the illegal constructionand reported the incident to the authorities, but no suspects emerged during the investigation. He was also attacked again, but did not report the incident to the police.

Manolis Psarros, 53, an employee of the state archaeological service. He was beaten by unknown assailants. Photo from 2023.

In March 2023, the island of Mykonos was brutally 53-year-old Manolis Psarros was beaten, an employee of the state archaeological service, and left unconscious in the street to bleed to death. The victim was taken to a state hospital.

In photo: State archaeologists in Greece hold placards as they begin a strike outside the Culture Ministry in Athens, Tuesday, March 14, 2023, to protest an attack on an archaeologist on the island of Mykonos that they say may have been linked to commercial pressure to boost tourism development. Archaeologist Manolis Psarros was beaten by an unidentified man, with a possible accomplice, in Athens last week, leaving him unconscious and bleeding in the street. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

Archaeologists working for the Ministry of Culture staged a five-hour work stoppage in protest at what their association called a “mafia-style attack.” Despina Koutsoumba, head of the protesting archaeologists’ association, reportedly said Psarros had handled numerous cases involving alleged abuses on Mykonos and had been called as a witness in court cases in the past.

It is worth noting that after the construction boom on the island began in the early 2000s, prices for building plots increased hundreds of times. For example: a plot of 150 m2, which cost up to 1 million drachmas (about 3,000 euros) in the 1990s, now costs no less than a million, but already euros. At the same time, construction in the historical part of the island is prohibited without an archaeological examination, which can put an end to any building if archaeological objects are found during excavation work.

Naturally, such a level of profit attracted the attention of the mafia and other criminal structures that have been working closely on the “Island of the Winds” for the past decades.

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