Greek Court Orders Woman’s Killer to Pay Relatives €905,000
Source: Balkan Insight
One of two men found guilty of raping and murdering a student on the island of Rhodes in 2018 – a crime that sparked protests in Greece – has been ordered to pay her relatives almost a million euros in compensation.
A Greek court has ordered an Albanian man to pay 905,000 euros in compensation to relatives of Eleni Topaloudi, a student killed by him and a Greek man on the Greek island of Rhodes in November 2018.
The Court of First Instance of Rhodes ordered the payment in compensation for victim’s relatives’ mental anguish.
In November 2018, 21-year-old Greek national Manolis Koukouras and 19-year-old Albanian national Aleksander Luca, raped and tortured Topaloudi.
Then they took her to a deserted area where they threw her body off a cliff while she was still alive but in a semi-comatose state. She drowned in the sea.
The crime caused widespread revulsion in Greece and protesters demonstrated outside the court at the start of the two men’s trial.
They were sentenced in May 2022 by the Court of Appeal to life imprisonment and additional 15 years each for the murder and gang rape of the young student.
The court did not recognise any mitigating factors. The Court of Appeal’s verdict was the same as the first instance verdict in May 2020.
Local Rhodes media outlet dimokratiki.gr reported that the victim’s parents, Ioannis Topaloudis and Kyriaki Armoutidou, her brother, her grandmother and other relatives then filed a lawsuit in the civil court seeking compensation for the anguish they had suffered.
The lawsuit highlighted the perpetrators’ brutality as well as the deceit and methodical way in which they tried to conceal their crime. Topaloudi’s family also claimed that the perpetrators’ relatives were responsible for the lack of supervision of their children.
The lawsuit reportedly was not filed correctly against the Greek killer, however, which is why the compensation order applies only to one of the two.
Greece recorded 15 femicides in 2024. A 40-year-old woman was the first victim of 2025; she died on January 3 in a hospital, where she was transferred after being beaten by her partner at the end of October. The Greek penal code does not include the term femicide as a distinct form of crime.
The original article: belongs to Balkan Insight .
