The body of a man who was murdered in Greece has arrived back home in Manchester after a two-and-a-half-year legal battle.
Lee Robinson, 41, was stabbed to death on the streets of Athens in December 2018. His family in Manchester were only told of his murder 16 months later after a DNA match on the Interpol database. By then he had been buried in an unmarked grave, as the Greek authorities had been unable to identify him.
The family had lost touch with him three years before his death. Before he went to Greece he had been sleeping in hostels and on the streets of Manchester on and off after a breakdown.
In August 2015, he was found living in a hostel and brought home, but by October he had gone missing again. In December 2015, the family opened his bank statements and learned that he had bought a ticket to fly to Corfu. They alerted the police and were told that despite him being on the missing persons register, he had been able to board the flight.
They never saw him again. In May 2020, British police turned up at his sister Shelley’s house to tell her that they had found him. He had been stabbed to death in a random attack as he slept in an abandoned building used by homeless people. A 32-year-old man confessed to the killing and is now in a psychiatric hospital.
Shelley said finding out how her brother had died was devastating. “The worst thing was finding out that it had happened so long ago, knowing that he had passed away all that time and we had been getting on with our lives oblivious.”
Victim Support helped the family find a solicitor to bring his body home. It was not an easy task. Getting a new death certificate issued was just one of a number of legal hurdles that had to be overcome by Mike Hagan, a travel litigation solicitor at Fletchers in the UK, and his Greek counterpart George Moschos, of Pavlakis Moschos Associates.
The certificate has been issued and Robinson’s body was repatriated this week and is in a funeral home in Manchester.
Hagan said: “This is a tragic case, and the family have been left utterly bereft by Lee’s murder. The fact that he was buried in an unmarked grave only made their already terrible loss more painful. We are glad to be assisting the family to obtain some measure of comfort, in being able to bring Lee home and have a burial for him in his homeland, at which his friends and family can properly grieve and say goodbye.”
