Greece’s attorney general has formally closed the door on any further criminal investigation into the country’s Predator spyware scandal, ruling that evidence presented during a months-long trial falls short of the legal threshold required to reopen the archived case. The decision was met with immediate and widespread condemnation.
In an act dated April 27, Prosecutor of the Supreme Court Konstantinos Tzavellas determined that evidence cited by an Athens criminal court does not constitute “new facts” under Article 43, Paragraph 6 of the Greek Code of Criminal Procedure, and therefore does not justify retrieving the case file from the prosecutorial archive for re-examination. “The elements invoked by the Athens Single-Member Misdemeanor Court do not constitute new evidence capable of justifying the retrieval of the case file from the archive,” Tzavellas wrote in a lengthy statement. “Consequently, the conclusions of Deputy Supreme Court Prosecutor Achilleas Zisis are not overturned.”
It took him roughly six weeks to reach that conclusion.
The Trial’s Findings and the Prosecutor’s Response
The decision follows a high-profile trial in which four individuals — Felix Bitzios, Sara Aleksandra Hamou, Tal Jonathan Dilian and Ioannis Lavranos — were each sentenced to a combined total of 126 years and 8 months in prison, with an effective custodial term of eight years to be served. The court found them guilty of illegal surveillance, violation of communications privacy and unauthorized access to data systems, targeting 87 victims.
The trial ran for months, produced extensive testimony, and — critically — the court itself did not consider its work finished. It referred three unresolved questions to the prosecutor for further action: whether additional individuals had participated in the scheme, including named persons such as Rotem Farkash, Merom Harpaz, Dimitris Xypteras and Ioannis Zoumpis; whether espionage charges could be sustained; and whether illegal trafficking of surveillance software had continued after Dec. 9, 2022 — a key legal threshold in the case.
Tzavellas rejected all three.
On additional suspects, the prosecutor argued that the evidence introduced at trial was already known to Deputy Prosecutor Achilleas Zisis during the original preliminary inquiry, and that reopening the file would amount to a third investigation without a genuinely new evidentiary basis.
On espionage, Tzavellas found that the existence of classified material was never proven. He addressed testimony from Christos Spirtzis, a former minister who told the court that his phone, targeted by Predator in November 2021, contained emails with classified content. The prosecutor noted that the presence of such messages on his device at the time of the attack was never established, and that retaining classified documents on a personal phone after leaving office would strip them of their classified status by definition.
On whether Predator was trafficked after December 2022, Tzavellas determined that the key witness testimony the court cited referred to a big data analysis system rather than spyware, and that no concrete evidence of Predator distribution after that date exists.
The Finding That Matters Most
Toward the end of his lengthy statement, Tzavellas reaffirmed the conclusion of the original preliminary inquiry: no Greek state agency — not the National Intelligence Service (EYP), not the Counterterrorism Unit, not the Hellenic Police (ELAS), not the Ministry of Citizen Protection — was found to have been involved with Predator. The case remains archived for everyone except the four people already convicted.
That finding deserves to be read carefully. The four individuals convicted ran a private surveillance operation that successfully targeted among others a sitting foreign minister, a minister of citizen protection, a former prime minister, the chief of the Hellenic Armed Forces and many others— 87 victims in total. And the conclusion of Greece’s highest prosecutorial authority is that they apparently did all of this entirely on their own, with no state involvement worth investigating and that the presence of classified material on the devices of those targeted was never sufficiently proven.
Reactions
The ruling has generated an immediate and sharp backlash across Greece’s political and media landscape, with critics describing the decision as a troubling signal about the country’s institutional capacity to hold those responsible for serious abuses of power fully accountable.
Nikos Androulakis, leader of PASOK and himself a confirmed target of the Predator spyware, announced an emergency press conference for later Monday afternoon. In an initial statement ahead of it, he noted that Tal Dilian, the retired Israeli intelligence officer at the center of the operation, was never summoned to testify before Tzavellas — despite having publicly claimed a direct working relationship with the Greek state. “The man who was blackmailing the Greek prime minister was never called to testify before Greek justice,” Androulakis said, holding Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis personally responsible for the situation.
Zacharias Kesses, attorney for a group of Predator victims, called the ruling “a provocative act of cover-up.” He noted that Tzavellas served as senior prosecutor overseeing the National Intelligence Service during the period when surveillance authorizations were being signed, and argued this required recusal. Kesses also stated that the prosecutor held the case file for roughly 20 days without conducting any investigative acts, and that on April 24 his office formally attempted to submit new sensitive documents as evidence — which Tzavellas declined to receive. The archiving decision came three days later.
Manolis Velergakis, who represents Androulakis before the European Court of Human Rights in a related proceeding, noted that several serving government ministers who were themselves Predator targets never filed complaints, never submitted their phones for forensic examination, and were never called as witnesses by either Zisis or Tzavellas.
Legal analysts and journalists have argued that closing the file in the wake of a trial that produced months of detailed testimony — and that the court itself used to flag unresolved questions — sets a deeply troubling precedent. and”justifiably deepens citizens’ distrust of justice.” Several observers noted the apparent contradiction between a court actively pointing toward further inquiry and the nation’s highest prosecutorial authority declining to follow that lead. What is clear is that the attorney general has, for now, decided that Greece has heard enough about Predator. Much of the country disagrees.
