Extradited (8 page)
Authors: Andrew Symeou
I’m one day closer to Justice. I can’t even describe how much I miss everyone. Grinding your teeth helps stop the tears. I can’t even think of good times because it’s just making me emotional.
I
n the afternoon we were made to pack our things and stand in a row in the hallway. There were about ten of us being transferred to Patras and the officers handcuffed us together in pairs. I was cuffed to the man who looked like my mechanic, but with fewer teeth and lots of tattoos. They took us out of the hallway and down the metal staircase into the underground car park. A few officers were asking questions and becoming irritated because I couldn’t understand them. The Greek dialect was also very different from the Cypriot, which made it even more difficult to follow!
There was a large, dark blue, coach-sized police vehicle in front of us that already held some prisoners from other jails. We were taken into the back of the coach where four of us were uncuffed and crammed into a cage that should have fitted a maximum of only two people. Thin metal walls surrounded us with small holes for air. In the cages were two metal seats facing each other with
only a little bit of space in between them. Two of us had to stand while the other two sat because there wasn’t enough room for four men. When standing up, we’d bend our knees and hunch our backs because the ceiling of the cage was quite low. We alternated for the delayed four-and-a-half-hour journey to Patras with our bodies squashed together. It was forty-degree heat and the men stank of body odour. Then again, so did I; I hadn’t had the chance to shower and was wearing the same clothes as the previous day. The other three prisoners smoked throughout the journey, regardless of the lack of space or fresh air. When the coach drove over a bumpy bit of road, my arm would sometimes be burnt with the tip of a cigarette.
If I peered through one of the holes in the side of the van, I could just about see a beautiful blue sea and lofty mountains in the distance. It’s as if they’d made the holes just big enough to give us a teaser of glorious freedom.
About an hour into the journey it dawned on me that I’d left my money and mobile phone in the possession of the transfer jail police officers. Before boarding the police coach, the officers must have been asking me whether I had any possessions to collect. I couldn’t understand a thing – my mind had been elsewhere and I’d completely forgotten about it. I would have kicked myself if I’d had the space around me! Having my mobile phone would have been the only chance to contact my family in Patras, if the police there were to allow me.
‘
Reh
, Tony Blair,’ as one of the men in the cage referred to me. ‘
Ti ekanes?
– What did you do?’
I tutted. ‘
Tipote
– nothing,’ I answered.
He laughed. The other two in the cage smiled with him. ‘
Gamise ta reh! Kaneis mas den ekane tipota!
– Fuck, man! All of us did nothing!’ he said, winking with his left eye and blowing out smoke. His right eye was lazy with a glazed cataract.
It was hours later when the vehicle had come to a stop. I was the only one to be taken out of the cage and handcuffed. Finally being able to stretch my legs outside, I was guided to the top floor of Patras Police Station via a flight of external stairs that looked like a fire escape. They dumped me in a cell that was already occupied by another man who looked a bit like Sean Penn – the same curved nose and slim lips with a trimmed, brown moustache in between.
I had no access to a clock, so I started to lose track of the hours passing. At one point, an officer opened the cell door and gave us both something to sign. ‘Sean’ took the pen and offered his signature. I asked what I would be signing for, but the officer kept silent and wouldn’t tell me. I remembered my mum’s words: ‘
Don’t sign anything!
’
‘I’m not gonna sign it unless you tell me what it is!’ I said.
‘Don’t sign it then!’ the officer said in perfect English. He shut the door, locked it and walked down the corridor for a moment. When he came back, he slid open the letterbox-type hole in the cell door and called Sean Penn over. The officer handed him an envelope, which had about €5 in it.
‘If you sign it they give you money for food!’ said Sean.
The police stations didn’t provide food or drinks for detainees – instead they purchased food from a local kebab shop.
‘
Kyrie Astynome
– Mr Policeman (the respectful way to address an officer, which I’d picked up in the transfer jail), I’ll sign it.’
‘You don’t wanna sign it remember? You don’t wanna eat,’ he mocked before turning around and walking back down the corridor towards his office.
‘I just wanted to know what it was!’ I shouted to the back of him. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I mumbled to myself.
‘He’s an arsehole. Don’t worry,’ said Sean Penn. He took his wallet out of his pocket and showed me a wad of fifties inside.
The guy was Albanian, but could speak English. I didn’t realise how many Albanians lived in Greece. He told me he was in for something that happened ten years ago. He was doing a friend a favour by giving him a lift home on his motorbike. It turned out the friend had shitloads of stolen goods in his bag. They were randomly stopped by the police and the guy ran off leaving him in the shit. I told him my story and he replied, ‘Wow, that’s one fucked-up story!’
The police in Patras were absolute cunts, they don’t care one bit. I was standing by the little hole in the door saying
‘Signomi Kyrie
– Sorry Sir’, but they walk past the door and blank me, or hold up their hand. Didn’t get any water for hours.
It took a while for us to get the attention of one of the officers. When we finally did, Sean offered him some money to buy a range of sandwiches, kebabs,
frappes
, fizzy drinks, bottles of water and packs of cigarettes. I ate one of the sandwiches and tried not to drink too much, but he insisted that I did. I appreciated it and thanked him for the generosity. It must have been at least 5 p.m. and if it wasn’t for him, I probably wouldn’t have eaten or drunk anything for two days.
It wasn’t long before Sean Penn was released from the cell and I was on my own. Later that evening I managed to get the attention of one of the officers and asked him if he could open my bag and hand me my journal to write in.
‘This is not a market place, this is a police station,’ he said. The comment frustrated me – I was desperate for the escape that writing had started to give me.
‘Sorry sir, I didn’t explain myself properly. I wasn’t looking to buy the notebook, I already own it.’
‘Do you think you are funny?’ he said in his thick Greek accent.
‘Why won’t you give it to me!?’
‘I am a policeman, I do not have to answer to you,’ he blurted.
The policeman woke me up at 3 a.m. Finally, I was allowed some clean clothes to wear. He said, ‘It’s going to be Monday when you see the judge.’ Hearing that I would definitely be in custody for another two days was a crap feeling.
I carried all my stuff out of the cell and he told me to put it all on top of my bag, rather than inside it. He cuffed me, then made me pack my bag. He could easily have let me pack it before being cuffed. They all stood around and watched me attempt to do it, dropping my possessions. They laughed at me, saying,
‘Kane grigora, Angleh malaka
– Do it fast, English wanker.’ I just about managed to pack it when he got annoyed and did it himself, deliberately scrunching up the envelope Riya had given me and squeezing my toothpaste in the bag. My clothes were covered.
They put me in the same kind of small police van that I was put in when I first landed in Greece. I was by myself, locked up in the back. There were lots of seats, but he pointed at one at the front and said, ‘Sit there, and only there!’ I didn’t know why. I later realised that the air con hole above me was the only one without a protector, the kind in cars that allow you to change the direction of the airflow. He turned the air con on and I was freezing. I had been sweating from the heat and it just froze onto my skin.
After a while a policeman opened the cage door and asked if the air con was OK. I asked him to turn it down and gave him the hand gesture to say ‘down, not up’. The bastard
purposely turned it up. I closed all the other air holes and sat on the other side, even though he told me not to.
We had parked on the ferry, waiting for it to move – it must have been two hours before it did. With the engine turned off, the icebox suddenly became a sauna. I sat for hours, listening to the bastards laughing and joking. The sun began to rise. Looking out of the little hole at the side of the van – I could see blue sea and land. We had arrived in Zante.
A police car had been waiting at the marina to escort us to Zakynthos town police station in Zante. It was only 500 metres away, but the police insisted on driving in front of the van with flashing lights and sirens on.
Neeeeee noooooor, neeeeee noooooor – big criminal coming through.
You would have been forgiven for thinking that they were holding Osama bin Laden, not Andrew Symeou, the student from Enfield. There wasn’t even any traffic.
I was exhausted, but still filled with a numbing fear. There were only three cells in the police station. I walked past the middle cell; it was filled with about six or seven men who could just about fit inside. I was taken to the cell on the far left, which was already occupied by one man. It was about 3 metres wide by 4 metres deep and a solid concrete bed was covered with flea-infested, dirty blankets. Unlike Patras Police Station, the entrance to the cell was made up of vertical metal bars and a gate, as opposed to a solid steel door. The outside wall – opposite the entrance – had a small rectangular window that was welded shut. Outside it was forty degrees, so the heat in the cell was almost unbearable.
The other man in the cell sparked up a cigarette and took a huge pull. He looked at me and threw the box in my direction;
I assumed he was offering me one so I took it and thanked him. I asked him,
‘Yiati eisai mesa
– Why are you in here?’ He put his hand to his nose and sniffed, so must have been something to do with cocaine. It wasn’t long before he was released and I was alone.
I started to read
The Da Vinci Code
. I brought it with me from home and the officers allowed me to have it inside the cell. About twenty minutes had passed and I could hear a female voice – I could have sworn that it was my mum. But the woman whose voice it was began to speak quickly in Greek and I realised that it wasn’t her. My heart dropped. Suddenly a woman walked in front of the cell bars. It took a while to process, but it was my mum. Seeing her standing in front of me just brought all of the emotion back. I had got myself into the ‘prisoner’ frame of mind – I was in the zone. I couldn’t process it. I couldn’t get up to go and speak to her; it took a few seconds to walk towards her and hug her through the bars.
I’d only been in police custody for a few days, but I had always had a close support network around me before my extradition. I was treated well by police officers in my own country – they’d refused to handcuff me and told me that the extradition should never have gone ahead. To then be treated like an animal in a foreign land (after a year of fearing it) was such a drastic transition that I fear my words won’t do it justice. I wasn’t merely held in a series of police cells waiting to be released, I constantly dreaded what the next day would bring. I reminisced about my past and questioned whether my future would be taken from me. Since my extradition, I’d been facing the journey alone and was forced to change my mentality. There had been no one around me to pick me up and it was completely draining to stay strong without them. But the moment I saw my mum standing in front of the
barred cell gate, all of that strength I’d built since I was dragged to Heathrow Airport days earlier had crumbled away.
I was shaking as I squeezed her arm. No words can describe how comforting it was to see her. I knew that my family was there to pick me up, like they had always been. Not everyone’s mother would be standing there like she was.
It wasn’t long before my mum was asked to leave, then a police officer approached my cell and gazed at me through the bars like I was a caged animal in a zoo. ‘
Ehoume CCTV, xeris?
– We have CCTV, you know?’ he said smiling.
‘Take it to the judge then; we can show it to her so she can let me go home,’ I said.
The officer’s smile became malicious as he walked away.
For the remainder of my time in Zakynthos, the police allowed my parents to see me for a few minutes a day at specific visiting times. They came back a few hours later and my mum told me that the officer had also mentioned something to her about CCTV of the alleged attack. Her response was exactly the same as mine: it needed to be included in the investigation because it was a crucial piece of evidence that would clear my name – if it even existed.