<B>A Greek</B> court handed down yesterday multiple life terms to the mastermind and chief hitman of the November 17 guerrilla group, which killed British, US and Turkish diplomats and Greeks in a 27-year reign of terror. Last week the three-judge court found the two and 13 other members of the radical Marxist group guilty of some 2 500 crimes, including multiple murders, bombings and bank robberies. Four defendants were acquitted. The convictions, at the end of a marathon trial, removed a major security threat ahead of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.

?For the murder of Stephen Saunders: Dimitris Koufodinas, life. Alexandros Giotopoulos, life?, presiding judge Michalis Margaritis said, referring to the group?s last killing: the shooting of the British military attache in Athens in 2000.

The mastermind of the shadowy gang, Alexandros Giotopoulos, 59, was found guilty last week of 961 crimes including plotting 19 murders, and was given 21 life sentences, the longest term in Greek legal history. Giotopoulos, a jobless mathematics professor and the son of Greece?s most prominent Trotskyite, was a student radical in Paris in the 1960s.

Beekeeper Dimitris Koufodinas, 45 years old, the group?s hitman ? nicknamed ?Poison Hand? for his pointblank, cold-blooded killings with a gun ? got 13 life terms for murder. Both men?s sentences were as requested by the prosecutor. Under Greek law, convicts given multiple life sentences stay in prison for a maximum of 25 years with the right to apply for a conditional release after 20 years. Greece does not have the death penalty.

The court also went along with the prosecutor?s other demands, sentencing four members of the group to between one and 10 life terms. The Greek authorities hailed the convictions as the end of the biggest domestic security threat facing the country as it prepares to host the Athens Olympics next August.

But Athens Mayor ? Dora Bakoyianni, whose husband was one of November 17?s victims, told a Greek daily earlier this week that there were still questions about the group?s leadership, and that much had to be clarified on the issue of terrorism in Greece. The daily paper Ta Nea cited police sources yesterday as saying seven members of the group were still at large.

Greek authorities have said that even though more arrests may be made of other members of the group, the core of November 17 had been destroyed. The close-knit Marxist group carried out a series of killings and bomb attacks dating back to 1975, baffling police until a bungled bombing in 2002 led to the arrest of one member and then to further arrests. November 17, named from the date of a 1973 student uprising crushed with tanks by the military junta that ruled Greece in 1967-74, claimed 23 killings, starting with the shooting of Athens CIA station chief, Jack Welch, in 1975.

A 20-year statute of limitation for murder means the group?s first four killings remained unpunished.

Aggeliki Koutandou