Ioannis Lagos awaiting sentencing in Greece last October. He has spent the months since then in Brussels, collecting his MEP salary. Photo: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images
A neo-Nazi member of the European Parliament, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison in Greece for leading a criminal organisation, has been stripped of his immunity.Ioannis Lagos has lived freely in Brussels, picking up his €9,000 (about £7,750) monthly salary, since a court in Greece sentenced him and other members of Golden Dawn last October.On Tuesday, MEPs voted 658-24, with ten abstentions, to remove his parliamentary protection. The next stage is for Belgium to extradite Lagos to Greece to begin his jail sentence.In a watershed moment for Greek politics, last October leading members of Golden Dawn were jailed for a range of crimes including running a criminal organisation and the murder of a leftist rapper.However, two of those sentenced have so far evaded justice: Lagos and Golden Dawn’s second-in-command, Christos Pappas.Pappas’ whereabouts are not officially known, but a VICE World News investigation concluded that, in all likelihood, he is sheltering in a Serbian-held area of Kosovo or the Bosnian Republika Srpska.
