Two men sentenced to life for rape and murder of Topaloudi

Two men who were found guilty of gang-raping and murdering 21-year-old university student Eleni Topaloudi on Rhodes in November 2018 were sentenced on Friday to life imprisonment and an additional 15 years each. The ruling was unanimous.

The prosecutor, Aristotelia Doga, had earlier rejected the defence's proposal to consider mitigating factors and called for the same sentence for the two defendants – a 23-year-old Greek man and a 21-year-old Albanian national.

Noting that the pair had not expressed regret for their crime and accusing them of “moral perversion,” Doga said they did not deserve any leniency from the court. 

The body of Topaloudi was found in the sea by the coast guard on November 28. The court heard how the two men lured Topaloudi to one of their homes, where they raped and beat her before throwing her off a cliff into the sea. 

The young woman was studying on Rhodes far from her home in the region of Evros. As it transpired from court records and police accounts, one of the men, the Albanian national had lured the young womsn saying they would go for a ride in a pickup and grab a bite to eat. Unbeknownst to her the other culprit, hailing from Rhodes, was hidden in the back of the pickup. The driver then detoured to Lindos and a house belonging to the Greek. there they raped her, beat her with an clothes iron and dumped her, still alive, in the sea, from a height of over 10 meters, where she eventually died of drowning.

During the trial the defendants tried to blame ech other for the killing.