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| - Two years after Greece's worst fire tragedy that claimed over 100 lives, a weekend report said a leading investigator was allegedly pressured to "bury" evidence. Kathimerini daily over the weekend reported that fire department investigator Dimitris Liotsios was allegedly told by then fire chief Vassilis Mattheopoulos to "bury" and "doctor" investigation files in order to "save himself" from retaliation by higher-ups. The daily said Liotsios had recorded a meeting with the fire chief on his cellphone, and submitted it to judicial authorities. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has called the report "chilling". "It is now clear there was an attempted cover-up," the premier said Sunday. The July 23, 2018 disaster in Mati, a coastal resort near Athens, left 102 dead. At the time, the leftist government had stressed the difficulty of organising an evacuation with winds blowing at nearly 120 kilometres an hour (75 mph). But in the aftermath of the disaster, the police and fire services gave conflicting accounts of what had gone wrong. The minister responsible for the police Nikos Toskas resigned within weeks, following accusations that police had not secured the area quickly enough nor alerted the fire service to the scale of the fire. Athens prosecutors have filed criminal negligence charges against 20 people including the regional governor, local mayors and senior officials in the fire service, the port police and in civil protection. The minister in charge of police at the start of the investigation, Olga Gerovassili, has rejected the Kathimerini report as untrue. Then fire chief Mattheopoulos has also dismissed the report as "lies", denying any contact with the investigator. "There was no meeting or contact...he did his job, I did mine," he told state TV ERT over the weekend. jph
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