The news that the 54-year-old man who was sentenced to life for the murder of his 43-year-old girlfriend in Kos, was finally innocent is making the rounds of the media. The perpetrator of the crime, as it turned out almost 9 years later, was finally a Pakistani, who was arrested in Germany and confessed to killing the unfortunate woman from Romania.
“You have no idea how much I would like to clear my name. My children, my own. It’s not easy to be called a murderer. Now that I know what happened, it’s vindication. Every year I had courts. I am devastated in every way. I said I’m not a murderer. I don’t think it’s racist, it was a murder,” he said speaking on Tlive, where excerpts of an earlier interview were shown, in which he declared his innocence and that he did not kill his 43-year-old girlfriend.
Yannis Zoto mentioned among other things that he returned to the factory where he worked before he went to prison, whose owner had believed him from the first moment.
As it became known, the Pakistani man was arrested in Germany for shoplifting and after an investigation the fingerprint was identified, while being interrogated he allegedly confessed that he had killed the unfortunate mother!
Last April 2023, it was revealed that the non-involvement of the 54-year-old had resulted from other evidence that was also confirmed by his advocate, Gianna Panagopoulou. The accused has already been released with the restrictive conditions of the ban on leaving the country and his appearance once a month at the police station of his place of residence, by a unanimous decision of the Mixed Court of Appeal of the Dodecanese, following a similar recommendation by the Prosecutor of the seat and in satisfaction of a request for suspension of his sentence.
The 54-year-old was sentenced in June 2015 to life imprisonment, a prison sentence of 3 years and 5 months and a fine of 1,000 euros, and only recently new evidence emerged that he did not commit the murder for which he was accused and stigmatized! More specifically, Deputy Constable Mr. Michalis Spanakis, Head of the Criminal Investigations Office of the Dodecanese Police Division 2, competently initiated the Security Directorate of Kos and from there, data from the identification of fingerprints (fingerprinting) obtained were forwarded to the Criminal Prosecutor’s Office of Kos from the bathroom where the victim was found dead from stab wounds.
It specifically emerged that fingerprints taken from the bathroom tiles, next to the lifeless body of the 43-year-old, belong with absolute certainty to a Pakistani, who lived with his countrymen in an apartment on the floor of the apartment building, where the crime was committed! In the previous trial before the Mixed Court of Appeal of the Dodecanese, which was adjourned due to insufficient evidence, the police officer had additionally testified that the specific crime could not have been committed by the accused within 6 minutes, namely from 01:38 when he left his job at a bakery and at 01.44 when he called to inform the authorities about the crime.
The Court had ordered to examine the footage from the cameras of the pastry shop where the accused worked to the scene of the crime and further to declassify the phone calls made on mobile phones. A laboratory expert report was duly submitted by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, confirming the allegations of the accused and it appears that he was calling his partner and that he is not justified in having committed the crime at the time it was allegedly committed, as he was at work!
