[ALBSA-Info] Daily Mail: Albanian Inmates Help Brits

[Agron Alibali]

DAILY MAIL (London) 
November 29, 2001 
FREE THE PLANESPOTTER 12 

ROSS BENSON 


The look that tore across the faces of the 12 British planespotters when they were told they were going back to prison was a mix of shock and dread and it was distressing to witness. 

They were expecting to be set free. I certainly thought they would be. The laws of natural justice demanded it. They have done nothing wrong. Their hobby 'may seem a little odd', as Peter Norris, who is one of the spotters, readily admitted to me. 'But is that a crime?' By Greece's preposterous laws, it clearly is. 

It had been a disgraceful day. The 12, including a 51-year-old grandmother, had been dragged into court in handcuffs, surrounded by a phalanx of armed policemen. 

They are accused of spying and they had been ruthlessly interrogated by the public prosecutor for 12 hours in a barren courtroom. They had been given only a piece of bread to eat and a glass of water to drink. 

An armed guard had accompanied them whenever they went to the lavatory and insisted the door be kept open. 

And at the end of those humiliations, at the very moment they thought their three-week ordeal was at an end, they were told they were going back to prison for at least another ten days, maybe a month - and possibly for as long as 20 years. 

It is every British tourist's worst fears made real and it showed. When they were told their fate and the policeman rushed forward to clamp the manacles back on, their shoulders slumped, their heads fell forward and there was an audible gasp of disbelief. 

But there was something else, too, and I could see it on their faces even in the dimly-lit court corridor strewn with empty paper cups and cigarette butts - and that was their look of utter disgust. 

'We've been terribly badly let down,' said Lesley Coppin, the grandmother whose husband, Paul, organised this ill-fated tour to Greece. 

Let down by their lawyers, who had manifestly failed to explain the hobby of planespotting to a disbelieving prosecutor. 

By the British Embassy, which, instead of exercising Britain's diplomatic might, has preferred to play by the diplomatic rulebook and 'let Greek justice take its course' (it is situations like this which explain why Lady Thatcher so detested the Foreign Office). And, most of all, by the Greeks. 

Greece is our partner in the European Community but its legal system is archaic, unjust and Third World. It is also cruel. Instead of being allowed out on bail on charges that any British judge would have thrown out of court, the 12 are back behind bars. 

They are being held in repellent conditions. The men are in the prison at Nafplion, 80 miles outside Athens. 

They are made to sleep on thin mattresses on a concrete floor because there are not enough beds for all inmates. They must buy their own food and several are suffering from severe stomach upsets after drinking the polluted water from the fountain in the corridor outside their cell. 

They had no cups or plates until the British Embassy finally got round to bringing them some, and they had to borrow eating utensils from the other prisoners. 

'Most of the other inmates are illegal immigrants from Albania,' said Peter Norris. 'We have come to rely on them. They have lent us money to buy loo paper and cups of coffee. 

'I never thought I would have to seek help from Albanians, but I have to say that they have been very kind to us.' 

T imes are tough for Norris and the other men, but they are even worse for Lesley Coppin, the only woman in the party. I went to see her in the police cells in Kalamata, where she was being held overnight before being taken before the prosecutor. 

I took her chocolate and cigarettes. I tried to cheer her up, but that proved to be impossible. She is too distraught to be cheered by mere words. 

'I am not a spy - I am just an ordinary housewife,' she told me, over and over again, and she certainly didn't look like a latter-day Mata Hari. 

She was wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of floppy grey trousers. Both were grimy with prison dirt. She was sleeping on a thin mattress laid on a bare concrete ledge with only a thin blanket for warmth. 

Her lavatory is a hole in her cell floor. Her hair was unwashed because there is no hot water and she has no soap. Her eyes were red from crying. 

She told me: 'I want to see my granddaughter, Jennifer, who is 12. And I desperately miss my golden retriever, Emmie. I know she is very miserable without me. All I want to do is go home.' 

Instead, she was put in a cage in the back of a prison bus and driven for seven hours to Korydallos, the notorious top-security prison near the port of Piraeus. 

There, she is locked in a cell with 18 hard-bitten female criminals, including prostitutes and murderers. 

'There is a woman here who chopped up her husband and then buried him in the garden and planted onions on top of his grave,' she said. 'I didn't think people like this existed outside the pages of a novel.' 

But they do. These are the people Lesley, assistant manager of a pizza parlour in Mildenhall, Suffolk, is going to have to mix with in the days to come. And that is unconscionable. 

Yesterday the British ambassador, David Madden, went to see the Greek Minister of Justice to urge him to put pressure on the three judges who have now taken over this extraordinary, absurd case to speed up their review of what is called 'evidence' - but consists of nothing more than a few notebooks, a spotters' guide to aeroplanes and some holiday snaps taken on a beach - with not a plane in frame. 

As things stand at the moment, however, Mr Madden's words are unlikely to have any effect. 

The planespotters were arrested in the little seaside town of Kalamata and it is little men who are in charge of the case. 

And like little men everywhere, they are revelling in their authority. They cannot comprehend why grown men should wish to spend their leisure hours looking at planes. 

All this is disturbing news for the 11 men locked up in Nafplion. 

It is even more upsetting for Lesley Coppin, alone in a foreign jail surrounded by the criminal scum of the Aegean. 

As I looked at the forbidding grey walls of her prison, I felt a sense of shame that we could allow this to happen to her. The Greeks have no moral right to lock her up because she has done nothing wrong. Nor have any of the others. 

They are law-abiding British subjects who came to Greece to enjoy their hobby. And in the front of their British passport it states, clearly and unequivocally, that they be allowed 'to pass freely without let or hindrance.' 

It is now the duty of Tony Blair's government to give real meaning to those words. 



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