Saunders was attacked and shot dead by two men on a motorcycle while driving through Athens traffic on his way to work at the British Embassy at 07:48 on 8 June 2000.
17 November (17N) claimed responsibility for the killing in a proclamation dated March 2000 and published in
Eleftherotypia on 9 June 2000. The group charged, falsely, that Saunders was an
RAF wing commander involved in the
1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. In fact he was a British Army brigadier with broad peacekeeping experience completely unconnected with the
Kosovo War. 17N revealed in a second proclamation dated 11 December 2000, also published in Eleftherotypia, the killers targeted Saunders because their primary CIA target was believed to be too heavily armed. Therefore, the killers used a
Heckler & Koch G3 assault rifle they had stolen from a Greek police station in August 1988. That gun jammed after one shot, and the killer[s] fired four more shots with a .45 Colt
M1911 pistol. Saunders died in the hospital two hours later. Witnesses to police they saw a shorter man behind a taller man, both helmeted, on a white
Enduro motorcycle. Police recovered a stolen green
Modenas Kris 111cc scooter with stolen licence plates parked nearby. The investigation that followed was driven by an unprecedented level of co-operation between Greek and UK Police services, with support from the U.S.
FBI and
CIA.
Scotland Yard provided training and sent Greek-speaking police officers to compile and restudy the fragmentary evidence compiled since 17N began its operations in 1975. Heather Saunders made a highly effective televised appeal for help in finding the murderers. Family members of 17N victims formed an advocacy group
Os Edo (Ως Εδώ – "Enough" [literally: "Up to Here"]) that lobbied for a tougher Greek anti-terrorism law, passed as Law 2928/2001. The investigation identified suspects for membership in 17N but produced no evidence usable in court. On 29 June 2002, 17N member Savvas Xiros (hitherto unknown to police) was gravely injured when a time bomb he was planting exploded prematurely in Piraeus. He agreed to confess that he had driven the scooter, with fellow member Dimitris Koufodinas carrying the G3. Before the 2003 trial of 19 suspected members of 17N, Xiros retracted his confession. Both he and Koufodinas were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder. An activist against the
Greek military junta of 1967–1974 named
Alexandros Giotopoulos, living underground under the pseudonym Mihalis Oikonomou since 1971, was convicted as 17N's leader and thus the moral instigator of the murder, while Savvas's brother Vasilis was convicted as the accomplice who helped preposition the vehicles.
Accusations of U.S. government complicity One of many attempts to implicate the U.S. government as the sponsor of 17N appeared in December 2005, when Kleanthis Grivas published an article in
To Proto Thema, a Greek Sunday newspaper. He claimed that "Sheepskin", the Greek version of
Gladio,
NATO's
stay-behind paramilitary capability during the
Cold War, carried out the assassination of CIA station chief
Richard Welch in Athens in 1975, and also the assassination of Stephen Saunders more than a decade after the Cold War ended. This charge was denied by the
US State Department, which responded that "the Greek terrorist organization '17 November' was responsible for both assassinations", and noted that Grivas's central piece of evidence was a disinformation document of Soviet origin (the so-called "
Westmoreland Field Manual") which the State department, as well as a Congressional inquiry had dismissed as a Soviet forgery. The documents make no specific mention of Greece, 17N, nor Welch. The State Department also highlighted the fact that, in the case of Richard Welch, "Grivas bizarrely accuses the CIA of playing a role in the assassination of one of its own senior officials" as well as the Greek government's statements to the effect that the "stay behind" network had been dismantled in 1988. In his 2010 memoir ''The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror'', former
CIA officer
John Kiriakou wrote of driving past Saunders's blood-stained car the morning of 8 June. He stated that the reason for his abrupt departure from Greece in August 2000 was the discovery that Greek
urban guerrilla organization 17N had been stalking him instead of Saunders. He quoted the 17N proclamation taking responsibility for the Saunders murder: "We saw the big spy, but he was in an armored car and we knew that he was armed. So we elected to carry out the sentence on the war criminal Saunders". ==Legacy==