Picture: www.tovima.gr
One of the Albanians who escaped from the prison in Trikala two months ago has been arrested. He was arrested in the afternoon on Good Friday by the police in Peristeri, after an Albanian tried to rob a supermarket together with his accomplice. The latter managed to escape and the Greek police organised a chase in order to find him. The two Albanians threw three grenades at the police and the crowd, but they did not explode. Reportedly, the person arrested is Ermal Litar, 38, who is considered the most dangerous of the escapees from the prison.
He is the first person to have been caught from the eight prisoners who escaped from Trikala, two months after the escape. It should be noted that it was precisely Litar who was in a private car in Isthmia in March this year, when during a robbery of a tavern and the subsequent chase, a 25-year-old woman was shot who later died in hospital. The police are investigating the possibility that Marco Kola, 36, who also escaped from prison, was with Litar. The two of them are considered the main representatives of organised crime, together with another three Albanians - two detainees in the prisons of Patras and Alikarnasos and the third has been released.
Kola started operations in Thessaloniki in the early '90s. On 23 November 2009 he escaped from the
police station in Thebes, and perhaps at the time he met Ermal, who came to Greece in 1994 and in 1998 was arrested for robbery in Agia Paraskevi. In 2006, Ermal was on furlough from the prison in Larissa and disappeared. He has committed multiple robberies in supermarkets in Menidi and Korydalos, and then he moved to Patras, where he robbed bank branches and supermarkets. Ermal has confessed to having committed 50 robberies with impressive candour. "I may have committed other robberies as well, but I cannot remember all of them. Anyway I will try to remember and tell you," he said in 2010. Since Kola “joined” Ermal in 2010, together with other accomplices, they have committed 30 robberies from Daphne, and Kaisariani and Kifissia to Ilion and Vari. Usually, they broke windows of banks and were armed with Kalashnikovs.
On 16 February 2010, Kola was arrested in Vyronas after a shootout with the police in which a 25-year-old man from Northern Epirus (Albania) was killed. At the time, 10 kg ΤΝΤ explosives and 25 hand grenades were seized. Ermal managed to escape, but was arrested on 25 May 2010, when he tried to rob a branch of the National Electricity Company in Kifissia.