He was born in October 1939. When he was still a baby, his father left for the Albanian front. He will never return from there. Like the Christos Tsigaridas he said, he had cross-referenced from various investigations and from later publications, such as Kathimerini that his father was one of the last, if not the last, dead of the war.
During the occupation, his mother went to live in Biletsi (today's Old Monastery), the village of Chr. Cigarette. There the woman becomes a link to the guerrillas. They leave in 1945 and return to Athens. During the holidays and summers, however, they spend them in the village.
Memories of civil war and the junta of colonels
There, at the age of 17, Tsigaridas will experience an incident that, as he said, would change his life. One day he was sitting in the village square and a woman approached him. She handed him a notebook and said, "Take it. You are educated. You are a capitalist. Use it in my husband's memory ". She was the widow of the village teacher who had been executed a few months after the civil war because he refused to shout "Long live America, down with Communism"! In that notebook the teacher was explaining why he had to die for his ideas.
As a student at the Polytechnic, Tsigaridas joined the ECHR and in the 1961 elections that went down in history as "violence and fraud" he made at least 50 objections, "fully substantiated" as he had said in his apology during his trial. Revolutionary People's Struggle. Not much is known about Tsigaridas' resistance during the dictatorship. He had also made sure to keep a low profile. He never spoke openly about what he did, although it is known that he also passed for interrogation from the infamous office of Lambros in the Security several times.
The change of government finds him also participating in the conversation that had opened in various committees that were then set up one after the other about the nature that the struggle should have. In one of these committees he meets Christos Kassimis. They had not spoken then. They first spoke at the end of 1975 in a construction site (Tsigaridas was the supervising engineer). The most frequent contacts began and after about a month, Kassimis brought him the famous "Chemical Fertilizers", the ideological and political text of the ELA. The real title of this text was "For the development of the Greek Popular and Revolutionary Movement".
The two men talked about this text for six whole months. At the end of this period, Tsigaridas decided to join the ELA but under a special regime.
The bloody clash of AEG, the death of Kasimis and Tsoutsouvis
When Tsigaridas joined ELA he had already started his own family, and because of his professional career he had a significant circle of acquaintances with many people. They agreed with Kassimis that getting involved in "armed propaganda" would endanger the organization as it would violate the rules of conspiracy. Thus, Tsigaridas' "job" in the organization was more in the ideological part but also in the part of counter-information (he was, after all, one of the editors of the counter-information magazine published by ELA) that the organization gave a great basis. Also, for the same reasons, Tsigaridas did not enter some of the autonomous nuclei of the organization and had his own separate link. This link was Chr. Cassimis!
Early in the morning of 20 July 1977, however, at the Renti vegetable market, next to the AEG plant, during an armed clash between police officers and suspects who were riding in a car, Chr. falls dead from the bullets of the uniformed men. Kassimis. Various incendiary bombs were found inside the car they were riding in. This was a major blow to Tsigaridas as he had a very close relationship with Kassimis.
Within the ELA, the fermentations about the way in which the organization would carry out its "armed propaganda" are now beginning and becoming more intense. There was the moderate part that wanted low-intensity bombings, symbolic and addressed to society in order to create a popular revolutionary movement. There was also the extremist part which was more hardcore and wanted dynamic actions that did not even preclude executions. For this reason, after all, ELA, in contrast to 17 November was the organization that had many divisions as its various nuclei became autonomous and proceeded to more dynamic actions creating new organizations. One of them was the "Anti-State Struggle" of Christos Tsoutsouvis who was also a member of the ELA and had left the organization taking with him a large part of its arsenal.
After Kassimis's death, the existing alternative plan was activated (he did not mention anything more about it), and Tsigaridas devoted himself to writing the "Counter-Information" and now had another link. At the end of 1989, the then association of Tsigaridas, in a meeting they had, announced to him that for personal reasons he was leaving the organization and told him who his new association would be. Tsigaridas asked him to convey to the organization that if he did not appear at the next scheduled appointment (in the early 1990s) this would mean that he himself would have left the ELA. As it finally happened…
At the ELA trial, Christos Tsigaridas assumed political responsibility for his participation in the organization until 1990.
Carlos's team, the Stasi archives, the arrest and the trial
The Greek law enforcement authorities put Christos Tsigaridas under their microscope, with the fall of the former eastern bloc and the opening of the infamous (and still disputed even today) Stasi archives. It was there that they first saw his name. To be precise, they saw the code name "Andrew". These documents reached the hands of the Greek authorities in the period 1993-1994. However, before the beginning of 1990, it was alleged that the Greek Police had been informed "unofficially" by its ranks. CIA for the action of "Andrew". This was the reason (according to the anti-terrorist) that Tsigaridas withdrew. He had felt the circle around him tighten.
For the Greek prosecuting authorities, Tsigaridas was the only one who had the moral and political stature to succeed Kassimis after the latter's death. Tsigaridas, always according to ELAS, was one of those who had come in contact with "Carlos the Jackal", As the chief terrorist Ilic Ramirez Sanchez was known. In February 2003, Carlos had given an interview to the newspaper "Apogevmatini" and the journalist Costas Papapetrou and had stated that he had no objection to testifying in the Greek courts and seeing the face of "Andrew" in order to confirm that this was indeed Christos Tsigaridas. . This deposit, however, was never requested.
Sector XXIII / 8 Internship was responsible for almost all terrorist organizations operating in Europe. Her main goal was Carlos. Stasi had managed to get information from Sanchez's deputy, the famous Johannes Weinrich or Steve, who was a key link with the ELA. When the Stasi archives were opened, a lot of information about the action and especially the main figures of the ELA were taken from Weinrich's correspondence with Carlos.
Christos Tsigaridas was arrested at his home at 1 Orionos Street, in P. Psychiko at 6 in the morning of February 4, 2003. It was an arrest that had actually been announced and for this reason the TV crews were at the scene early! Tsigaridas was then considered "the theorist of the leading team of ELA".
In the trial that followed, Tsigaridas was sentenced to 25 years in prison and fined 22.000 euros. He was released from prison in January 2005 for health reasons (his doctors testified that he suffered from severe heart failure, severe obstructive generalized vascular disease, loss of vision in one eye, etc.).
In the Court of Appeal that ended in December 2009, Tsigaridas was acquitted as the five-member Criminal Court of Appeal unanimously accepted his statement that he was a member of the ELA until the end of 1989 and acquitted him of every act from 1990 onwards. During the time he was a member, he acquitted him with a 3-2 majority from the category of simple synergy in the actions of ELA.