A research text dump on Nikolaos Karvounakis

Introduction

HMA v Nikolaos Karvounakis

Date: Feb 16, 2022

Source: <judiciary.scot>

At the High Court in Edinburgh today, Lord Braid sentenced Nikolaos Karvounakis to 8 years and 4 months imprisonment after the offender pled guilty to a contravention of section 57 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

On sentencing Lord Braid made the following statement in court

"Nikolaos Karvounakis, you have been convicted of a contravention of section 57 of the Terrorism Act 2000. You had in your possession a device containing explosive material in circumstances giving rise to reasonable suspicion that your possession was for a purpose connected with the commission, preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism. The terrorist organisation whose cause you were seeking to promote was the ITS, an eco-terrorist group which commits acts of violence against people or property in support of environmental causes.

You bought the necessary components over a period of months, and, using an instructional video on the internet, assembled them into a viable device. You put the device into a pipe inside a cardboard box, which you placed in Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, where it was discovered on 11 January 2018. Inside the pipe were 58 nails, 27 of which had been cut in half. As you acknowledge, had the device detonated, it could have caused significant injury to persons and damage to property in close proximity, due to the nails and fragments of pipe being projected outwards. Fortunately, that did not happen, but the finding of the device resulted in massive disruption to the surrounding area, which lasted well into the following day. The emergency services also required to become involved.

Although the device did not detonate, all of the components necessary for that to happen were present including an initiator (a lightbulb filament), the main charge (ground match heads), a power source and a switch – wires which were intended to connect when the flap of the box was opened.

You say that you did not intend the device to detonate, and manufactured the device in such a way that it could not have ignited. I have three things to say about that. First, to an extent that is already reflected in the terms of the offence to which you have pled guilty, which nonetheless carries a maximum prison term of 15 years. Second, the scientific evidence is that even if what you say is true, there remained a potential for explosion, due to the potential introduction of a hot filament wire in close proximity to a low explosive substance, for example if the fuse was not sufficiently well separated from the filament. And third, your present position is not consistent with the claim of responsibility which you posted, or at least caused to be posted, on the internet shortly after the device had been found.

You have expressed remorse for your actions. You have apologised and tendered a letter to the court in which you profess to have renounced your past ideological inclinations. The tone of the letter is in stark contrast to the chilling words in your claim of responsibility.

I take into account the Criminal Justice Social Work Report and everything said on your behalf in mitigation. The Report to an extent supports your renunciation of your beliefs, insofar as that can be objectively verified, and also contains your explanation that you committed the offence due to your feelings of inadequacy and a desire to gain approval from those you were communicating with online. The report points out there was a period of three and a half years between the commission of this offence and your arrest when you do not appear to have been involved in any further offending, as highlighted by your solicitor advocate. The imminence of further offending by you does not appear to be high.

Nonetheless, in selecting the appropriate headline sentence, I must take into account that the offence involved a high degree of culpability on your part, as shown by the significant degree of planning; that you were reckless as to whether injury to innocent members of the public was caused or not, and that afterwards you appeared to exult in the commission of the offence in your claim of responsibility. I also take into account that if the device had detonated, serious injury could have been caused to multiple victims.

For an offence of this nature, I consider that the primary sentencing aims are protection of the public, punishment and deterrence; and that a significant sentence is called for as an expression of society’s abhorrence of terrorist activity and to deter others. As far as protection of the public from you is concerned, that will also be achieved, on your eventual release from custody, by the Serious Crime Prevention Order which I also propose to make.

Your personal circumstances do provide some mitigation, including that you have no previous convictions, that you have expressed remorse for your actions, and that you do appear to have renounced the beliefs which led you to commit this offence. All of this does serve to reduce the sentence which might otherwise have been passed.

Taking all of that into account, had you not pled guilty, the sentence I would have imposed would have been one of 10 years’ imprisonment. You are entitled to a discount to reflect your guilty plea. Having regard to the stage at which the plea was tendered, and its utilitarian value, I consider that a discount of one sixth is appropriate, resulting in a sentence of 8 years and 4 months imprisonment. This sentence will be backdated to 2 August 2021.

As a result of this sentence you will be subject to the notification requirements of the Counter Terrorism Act 2008 for a period of 15 years.

I will also make a Serious Crime Prevention Order in the terms sought by the Crown."

‘Eco-terrorist’ who planted bomb in Edinburgh park jailed

Source: <theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/feb/16/eco-terrorist-who-planted-bomb-in-edinburgh-park-jailed>

Nikolaos Karvounakis had placed improvised device at Princes Street Gardens in January 2018

Nikolaos Karvounakis, 35. Photograph: Police Scotland/PA

A self-styled eco-terrorist who planted a viable homemade bomb in a popular public park in central Edinburgh has been jailed for more than eight years.

Nikolaos Karvounakis, originally from the Greek island of Crete, had placed the improvised device packed with 58 nails and sections of metal pipe in a shelter at Princes Street Gardens in January 2018.

Written on the flap inside the box were the words “fuck you all”. The device included low grade explosive, and a primitive but disconnected fuse made from a light filament and a battery.

Army explosives experts believed that had it been made operational or accidentally detonated, it would have been capable of causing significant injuries, the high court in Edinburgh heard. Karvounakis later claimed to be linked to a fringe group accused of eco-terrorism which originated in Mexico.

It took nearly two years before Karvounakis, 35, a former Greek national serviceman, was arrested. In December 2020 Police Scotland counter-terrorism officers received intelligence from European counterparts linking him to the offence. DNA taken from tape used in the device was found to belong to him.

Six weeks after the device was found, the Edinburgh Evening News received an email headed “International Terrorist Group in UK”. It contained a link to an extremist website where Karvounakis had anonymously claimed responsibility with a picture of the device and signed “Misanthropos Cacogen”.

Speaking for the prosecution, Angela Gray, the advocate depute, said Karvounakis claimed to be a “lover of nihilist anti-political violence” and to support an anarchist terror group Individualidades Tendiendo a lo Salvaje. The group has been blamed for bombing a nano-technology lab in Mexico City in 2011 that seriously injured a robotics researcher.

Gray told the court: “This is known as ITS, an abbreviation of a Spanish phrase translating to ‘individualists tending to the wild’. This Mexican terrorist organisation was formed during 2011. The group focuses on eco-terrorism, which involves acts of violence committed against people and or property in support of environmental causes.”

John Scullion QC, Karvounakis’s defence counsel, said he had been struggling with anxiety and low self-esteem, and had spent increasing amounts of time online. There he had drifted into conversations with extremists, whose beliefs he now repudiated.

Scullion said his client, who pleaded guilty to an offence under the Terrorism Act, had intended to cause disruption but had not planned to injure people, so had left the detonator unconnected. “It is fair to say he now bitterly regrets what he did and will bitterly regret it for the rest of his life,” Scullion told the court.

Lord Braid jailed Karvounakis for eight years and four months, and said he would have been jailed for 10 years had he not admitted his guilt and had no previous convictions.

“The offence involved a high degree of culpability on your part as shown by the significant degree of planning,” the judge said. “Afterwards you appeared to exult in the commission in your claim of responsibility.”

Det Chief Supt Stuart Houston, Police Scotland’s head of counter-terrorism, said: “The ideological beliefs held by Karvounakis were unusual.

“His reckless actions showed utter disregard for the safety of anyone within Princes Street Gardens [and] there is no doubt his presence and engagement online after the event could have easily encouraged others to carry out similar acts, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Not just in Scotland.”

Primary Source Reading

Communique of the Individualists Tending Towards the Wild #48

My End is My Beginning.

Abyss rises. The sound of the tunnels is thumping to my ears. I walk in desolation into the fields of urban greyness. All that surrounds me, every ”normal” humanoid, is performing a litany towards crushing determinism. One more time I seize the opportunity to act and unleash My Hatred. I get ready not to stray from the mechanistic ”life-form”. I call upon Death and we enter in a maelstrom of the heartbeat of Chaos that transforms blood into a pumping engine in the libido of voidance that dissolves humanity attempting indiscriminate Destruction and Murder.

In extreme misanthropic skepticism and experimentation, beyond any human notion, I claim nichilistically the following attacks:

-The arson of 2 mini buses transporting elder people.

Why? Why don’t you ask the guys from the books you read to tell you why? Oh shit! They’re dead? I’ll tell you why then! Because I hate old people! Hahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahhahahahahhahahahahahahaha!!!

-A package bomb left totally indiscriminately at a central location selectively.

Why do I not think of the ”innocent” people one might think… I answer with a question… Did my birth giver’s pussy think when it was fucked to be fertilized with microscopic semen that creates the vessels that I hate? Did anybody ask me to be born? Did anyone know what I would become? Do you know that some see consciousness as a curse? Fuck you, pathetic pricks, you don’t know shit then! I do not seek justification for existence, neither do I seek someone to blame. I seek the amoral rape of existence through the injection of life passing from the Death Gate. Anti-human odium is my life’s blood, transforming my vessel into the Beast.

The joke of human consciousness and what it creates I confront with nihilistic laughter, unconscious cynicism and misanthropic passion! When I say ”fuck you all”, it might as well be the most sincere thing I have said my

whole life! I wish my scream could burn you all, but it can’t do fuckin shit! Hahahahahahahah! This is why I have to experiment with fire, poison, bombs, even if the attack fails. Next time it might not, until I satisfy my Egotistical Satanity.

I do not care at all to offer an ”alternative” to the cops’ rhetoric, I will let them have it their way, since this is not a conversation anyway! Though they broke my heart that they didn’t share my ”message” to the world! Hahahahahahaha! My acts and their claims are personalised and I will enjoy them in the way I want. In this only I make the rules. I learned what my mistakes were this time and I am not going to repeat them. But for me the experimentation is all that matters. Really beyond good and evil and not just in words.

All those who think they have theoretically banished morality make me laugh morbidly. To destroy morality one carries the knife and jabs it in the flesh till it reaches the bone. I blow myself amorally against the foundations of ethics to nihilistically recreate myself. Going beyond the normal nihilist and the tolerant attitude of internalized humanist emotional limit created by the evolutionary disease of the training epiphanies of modernity and the anthropocene.

Any judgement comes through thought. A world that for me doesn’t exist. All I hear is vomit coming out of a hole we named mouth. The correlation of thought with reality is for me as contemptible as is the human condition itself. I do not judge, I do not justify, I take the instance of Nihility and I transform it into an attack on Life and a flirt of Death. I obliterate any ethical question as a clutch of conscience that devours an organism. As a concept that conciliates its creation with the supposed ”reality”. If humans were to go extinct this instant nothing would happen except that there would be no consciousness to tell about it. What are ethics if not sophisticated human artificiality? What are ethics if not the soothing, illusory agreement of the valuer and what is valued? What are values if not a leap of faith in the continuation of ”human” existence? Values, either metaphysical or not are a branch for the human being to grasp in order not to fall into the Void of the Abyss, stare at itself, and see nothing.

In my descent there are no words to describe how I feel or who I am. Language is a useless mass of human sounds and holy scripts that limit my Ego. The foundationless Nihilism is concluded Anti-human, at least for me. If only we could be free of metaphysicality! But especially today where the image makes a host out of everyone and consolidates ideology nothing can be expected. Beyond good and evil means only one thing. Not even I am liable to re-establishing this concept. This human notion.

I am an enclosed circuit, but one that wouldn’t exist without the world that surrounds it. I am not a spirit. Nothing is ethically important. I have no important targets and others not so important. In my scorn for the human animal and its projection of existence I experiment with Total Nihilism into Unknown territory. I seek the dissolution of the limit, ”spiritual” or ”physical”, that had been imposed by man. I deny any injection of the spirit through the flesh opening the window to ideological compartmentalization. Flesh has its own life and the metaphysical gate is denied. I deny god without replacing it with anything and for this I am Satan. For every ethics and ideology I will always be Satan.

It takes one to have known the spirit in all its aspects to be able to negate it. The illusion of freedom of the ”untouched ones” by civilization, hahahahahahahahahaha, this is another form of slavery, a form of humanistic denial of reality. Misanthropy will either be real experimentation through Nihility or it will be the will of Christ. You choose. My Misanthropy is a bomb at the core of ”human existence”. I see the human condition and consequently the human being as an inherently artificial animal. Its cognition and the conciliation of the perception/ value/ judgement/ reality/ action with the world is an error. If human consciousness is a ”privilige” of ”being human”, I only see imbecility of the highest kind and I attack it nichilistically, embracing the Dead End.

Everything I write is blood, sweat, flesh and semen. This creates My Spirit that claims itself in the Moment of emanation out of the Abyss in direct contact with reality. Everything else is humanistic trash that will be eradicated through Nihilism. The human spirit runs rampant today and every word is diarrhoea blown backwards. Idealism is crushed in the same way humans are crushed like bugs by the cycles of nature. Knowing of course that every aspiration, passion and ego worshipping desire will never be the same in contact with reality. The correlation of the two is totally discarded. But this is not an impediment for me and My Will, only an admittance and realization.

I believe in uniqueness but not as an ideology which sees it as a value, but only as a reductive tool for analysing a neverending battle that can never be completed inside human nature. After Stirner became an ideology throughout the years, it was a clear example that ideology is part of human nature, and that freedom, whichever the approach, is a disease.

I ask all those who want to create an ideological consciousness, or let’s call it for what it is, conscience, where is the clear distinction between determinism and free choice? Where is the clear distinction between ”domination” and ”free relations”? I assume they have the answer in hand because all of them have lived these ”pure” relations in reality and know how to go about them. And how to synchronize their minds with others to learn how to do it! But it appears that some have taken it upon themselves to become the next relics taking their rightful and righteous place among the legacy of humanochristianism.

Just to make it clear I am not conducting an anti-anarchist war nor an anti-fascist war, these are concerns that I don’t give a fuck about. I have seen so much hypocrisy in people that I cannot forget. I have seen so much torment by ideas but also from habit, I have seen hidden but also crude moralism, I have met so many people that wasted my time, I have been betrayed indirectly and directly. My Hate has moved to other fields, I have become something else and I thank all of you for creating me!

Furthermore I claim myself as part of the international Terrorist Mafia known as ITS. Between egoist conspirators I accepted a criminal offering on the basis of common interest. This is no spiritual union like those of the anarchists. I am not an Eco-extremist, I am a Nihilist Misanthrope as I like to call myself. Of course words mean nothing and are used in a specific context and for my own benefit.

”ITS is no longer a merely eco-extremist group but is nourished by the strongest egos, the most isolated solitaires and the most resentful individuals with civilization / humanity, within ITS there are people who do

not share spirituality either, they do not have beliefs, they do not have deities or anything like that, and we respect that completely, for the purpose is destruction and not so much “creed affiliation” or any other affiliation to some rotten and decadent ideology. That is, we want to make ITS a unique group, primordial, that represents everything we think and do, that is a latent danger, constant and mobile to act anywhere, unstoppable and dangerous.”

-X

We unite on the basis of egoistic respect, for concrete things that we share, for the materialization of our instincts against artificiality and not for the spiritualization of our desires, that dissolves the foundations of anarchochristianic solidarity and seeks to maximize power amongst interests for destruction of this humanistically pious world.

”The expansion of knowledge and egocentric experimentation are very important for individualists like us, climbing animalistic violence to more extreme degrees makes our personal war unique, so that we can experience and nurture our experiences, at the end of the day ITS is just a timeless meeting of individuals with a desire for destruction, where you can learn and teach with tangible facts, destroying the idea that a “terrorist group” “must be” a circle where only rotten ideologies are shared among the members. The passion above all!”

-X

Misanthropos Cacogen is a lover of nihilist anti-political violence. Terror inside the pettiness of this world is fun! My attempts for ”unholy” pleasure and murder are not over yet. All aspects of humanism are dead! Long live Death! Who would have the power to face the intensity of Nihil and survive? Then the question that arises is, who would become a Nihilist instead of a christly ”contemplator”?

Nihilist aggressor, Misanthropos Cacogen – Individualists Tending towards the Wild