The former Greek dictator, Giorgios Papadopoulos, ringleader of the colonels' junta which tortured and jailed thousands between 1967 and 1974, has died in an Athens hospital at the age of 80 after a long fight with cancer.
Papadopoulos was born in the Peloponnese in southern Greece in 1919. He graduated from an Athens military academy in 1940 and was an artillery lieutenant on the Albanian front against Italy. Later, during the Nazi occupation, he joined resistance units.
Early in his career he joined a secret organisation of right-wing junior officers seeking to expand the military's political base. As a captain after the war, he fought against the left during the Greek civil war from 1947 to 1949. He was made a colonel in 1959 and was put in charge of the Central Intelligence Service, becoming chief of national security and counter-intelligence.
Papadopoulos and two other colonels - Nikolaos Makarezos and Stylianos Pattakos - seized power in the early hours of April 21st, 1967, in a lightning coup days before elections which the left was expected to win.
As minister to the prime minister's office, Papadopoulos controlled counter-espionage, news broadcasting, propaganda, censorship and public administration. After a failed counter-coup by royalists, he became prime minister in December 1967. He became the junta's unchallenged strongman in a brutal dictatorship during which thousands of dissidents were arrested, tortured, and deported.
Key leaders of political resistance to the colonels included the composer Mikis Theodorakis and Andreas Papandreou, a future prime minister. More than half-a-million demonstrated in Athens in November 1968 for democracy during the funeral of Papandreou's father, the veteran liberal leader, Giorgios Papandreou.
A visit in 1971 by Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who was of Greek descent, was viewed as tacit approval of the regime by President Nixon. Last year, the US ambassador in Athens, Mr Nicholas Burns, apologised for past US policies and conceded Washington should have "stood more firmly" on the side of democracy.
Papadopoulos's wild and confused speeches full of anti-communist vitriol, stressed the "the Greek-Christian ideal", the fatherland, the "pure race", and "Christian values". But despite his obsession with "traditional values", he was divorced and remarried and maintained a luxurious lifestyle at a seaside villa loaned by Aristotle Onassis.
In 1972, Papadopoulos assumed the title of regent and awarded himself important portfolios, including defence and public order. When royalist naval officers attempted a coup in May 1973, he decided Greece should become a republic and staged a referendum which appointed him president. But he was toppled by his military police chief, Gen Dimitris Ioannides, in November 1973 after a student uprising at the Athens Polytechnic.
Papadopoulos was arrested in October 1974 and sentenced to death for high treason and insurrection the following year, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
He stubbornly refused to seek a pardon and a government decision to free him on humanitarian grounds in 1990 was dropped after a public outcry and protests. In August 1996, he was moved to hospital for cancer treatment.