THESSALONIKI, Greece — A twice-convicted serial rapist who was wanted by the police over a new rape accusation jumped off a cliff on the island of Corfu this weekend to escape capture but ended up breaking several bones, the authorities said.
The fugitive, Dimitris Aspiotis, 47, called “the beast of Kavos” after the holiday resort on Corfu near where the rapes occurred, was arrested and hospitalized with severe injuries. He was convicted in 2007 of assaulting three women between 1997 and 2005, and again in 2012 for the rapes of three British women during the summer of 2010, according to local news reports.
For the 2012 convictions he was sentenced to 52 and a half years in prison, but was freed with restrictions in November 2018 under a Greek law intended to reduce overcrowding in prisons.
Under the terms of his release, he had to present himself at the police station on the 1st and 16th of every month, a police spokesman said.
An Albanian man reported this month that his 34-year-old wife had vanished after visiting Mr. Aspiotis’s house in Lefkimmi, a town on Corfu, a spokesman for the police said by phone on Wednesday.
The man told the police that he had fallen asleep at the house, and that when he woke up, his wife and Mr. Aspiotis were missing, the spokesman said.
According to the police spokesman, the woman was found by officers early on May 9, after escaping from a hut in the woods. She said that Mr. Aspiotis had lured her there, kept her captive and repeatedly raped her at knife point, the police said in a statement.
A hunt for Mr. Aspiotis ensued, with more than 100 officers and dogs on the trail. When the police tracked him down on Saturday, the police spokesman said, Mr. Aspiotis made a run for it and jumped off a 260-foot cliff.
He broke several ribs and suffered fractures in his pelvis and hip, as well as other injuries, the police spokesman said, and was hospitalized in Corfu under guard.
The police found two phones, a loaded hunting rifle, knives, switchblades, screwdrivers and other weapons in his possession.
He will be formally charged in the attack on the Albanian woman after he has had surgery for his injuries, The Guardian reported.
The case shines a light on Greece’s troubled judicial system. The number of reported rapes in Greece was 167 in 2019, according to the police, but there have been concerns for years that rapes are underreported and that the actual number is closer to 4,500 per year, according to local news reports.
The law under which Mr. Aspiotis was originally released faced wide condemnation in Greece, and was eventually abolished in August 2019.
And it was only last year that Greece amended the criminal code to recognize that sex without consent is rape.
“This is a historic victory, not just for the campaigners who have fought long and hard for this day, but for all women in Greece,” Eirini Gaitanou, Amnesty International Greece’s Campaigner, said in June 2019.
She added that it “makes it clear that physical violence is not required for the crime to be considered rape.”
One of the British women Mr. Aspiotis was convicted of raping in 2010 broke her anonymity last year when she learned that he had been released from prison.
“I don’t believe he’s changed,” the woman, Kayleigh Morgan, told the British news media. She had given eence at his trial, after which, she said, the judge apologized on behalf of the Greek people and told Ms. Morgan “to go and enjoy” the rest of her life.
“A person like that can never change, and now I’m terrified he’ll do what he did to me again to more victims,” she said in 2019.
On Sunday, after news of his flight and capture broke, Ms. Morgan told the British tabloid The Sun: “I warned he would strike again and was proved right. I hope he stays in pain for the rest of his life.”
In an interview with the Greek news media last year, in which Mr. Aspiotis admitted raping two of the women in 2010 but not the third, he said he regretted his actions, adding, “No one should be scared of me.”
