The EOKA Period
Sampson was born in the Cypriot port city of Famagusta to Sampson Georgiadis and Theano Liasidou. During his teenage years, he was a footballer, playing as a right back in the Anorthosis Famagusta second team. He began his working life at a Nicosia newspaper,the Times of Cyprus, which was owned and edited by Charles Foley. His original name was Nikos Georgiadis, but he adopted his father's forename as his surname.
During the EOKA resistance campaign against British rule in Cyprus, waged from 1955 to 1959, he adopted the nom de guerre Atrotos (Greek: Áτρωτος), or "Invulnerable". Sampson joined EOKA and formed part of than execution team under the direct orders of General Georgios Grivas ("Digenis"), leader of EOKA. Another member of this team was Neoptolemos Georgiou ("Leftis"), who later in the 1960s was considered Sampson's right hand man). They participated in a number of executions carried out along Ledra Street which was called the "Death Mile", including three police sergeants, for one of which Sampson was tried in May 1957. He confessed but was acquitted on the grounds that his confession may have been coerced by torture.
At the time, Sampson was working as a journalist and used to photograph dead bodies to be published in the Times of Cyprus. The police became suspicious about how Sampson was always the first reporter to arrive at the murder scene and he was arrested. Only a month after his acquittal, he was given away by informants and arrested in the village of Dhali. He was convicted of weapons possession which, under the emergency regulations of the moment, carried a death sentence. The death sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment and Sampson was flown to the United Kingdom to serve it. A year and a half later, under a general amnesty as part of the 1959 Zürich and London Agreement, he was released but he remained in exile in Greece until Cyprus gained formal independence in August 1960. He returned to Nicosia shortly after Independence Day.
Read more about this topic: Nikos Sampson
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