On Grigorios’ name day, January 25, 2021, Grigoris Dimitriadis received numerous congratulations. This is common in Greece: for many people your name day is even more important than your birthday. And Dimitriadis is a popular figure: he is the cousin – and at the time was also right-hand man – of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. In that capacity he had direct access to the Greek secret service.
A day later, eleven prominent Greeks, including the then chief of police and the public prosecutor in charge of the secret service, received a message from Dimitriadis’ phone. The message included a digital thank you card: ‘Thank you very much for your congratulations. All the best for you too’. Anyone who clicked on it immediately lost control of their phone.
Role of the Prime Minister
The details about the thank you card appear in documents that the Greek investigative portal ‘Reporters United’ received and shared with international partners of the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) investigative network, including NRC. The course of events sheds new light on the role of Prime Minister Mitsotakis in the wiretapping scandal that has engulfed Greece for years.
The eleven victims were attacked via his cousin’s infected thank you card with spyware called Predator, which was designed to steal data and images from their phones. The microphones of infected telephones can also be controlled remotely to listen in on conversations. Moreover, the phones in question can be tracked via GPS.
The case came to light when Greek reporter Thanasis Koukakis announced last year that his phone had been infected with Predator for ten weeks. It turned out that he was far from the only one: the phones of other journalists, a MEP, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and prominent businessmen were also infected. The Greek Data Protection Authority has identified a total of 92 cases.
Some of them also turned out to have been spied on by the secret service before. This fueled suspicions that the Greek state was behind the spyware infection. A government that spies on its own citizens, including its own critics – the comparison with the American Watergate was quickly made.
Prepaid cards
But definitive proof is difficult to find. It is not without reason that the Greek data protector has been investigating for a year. For example, the senders of the spy software used untraceable prepaid cards. Dimitriadis’ phone number was displayed on the phone displays of the eleven recipients of the thank you cards. If the target had his phone number saved in their phone’s phone book, his name would even appear on the screen. There was nothing to indicate that the message did not come directly from Dimitriadis.
The question now is whether the Prime Minister’s cousin and right-hand man actually carried out the attack himself. He himself denies any involvement, and the Prime Minister makes no comment.
Der Spiegel, one of the partners in the journalist consortium, wonders: “Even if an unknown third party carried out the attack on the eleven targets without any intervention from DImitriadis, how would these people have known who congratulated Dimitriadis on his name day the day before? ? Where else could it come from than from Dimitriadis himself?”
A decision is still not expected soon: the highest prosecutor has taken over the case from the actual prosecutors in the case. And that official is appointed directly by the government.
Also read
Greece refuses to be open about eavesdropping on journalists and politicians