On 21 February 2016, Pola Roupa, Greece’s most-wanted terrorist and leader of the Revolutionary Struggle (RS) group, stunned the country by hijacking a helicopter in order to free her partner and fellow RS militant, Nikos Maziotis, held in the maximum-security prison of Korydallos in Athens.
In a daring, one-woman commando-style operation, Roupa took the helicopter pilot hostage, forcing him at gunpoint to fly over the prison courtyard. The attempted jailbreak, however, failed when the pilot resisted, managing in the struggle that ensued to regain control and land the helicopter away from Korydallos. Roupa ran off but was eventually arrested a year later by Greek counter-terrorism police in a middle-class suburb south-east of Athens, where she was living under an assumed identity with her 6-year-old son.
Roupa’s arrest was the final nail in the coffin of RS, marking the end of a 15-year campaign of politically motivated violence by the first guerrilla group to emerge on the country’s terrorist landscape after the 2002 collapse of 17N, Greece’s premier terrorist organisation and one of Europe’s longest-running terror gangs. Led by Maziotis and Roupa, Revolutionary Struggle picked up the baton of terrorist revolutionary violence in 2003, before even the 17N trial had come to an end and sentences were passed.
