Panagoulis' Attempt on Papadopoulos

On 13 August 1968, Alexandros Panagoulis, a young opponent of the military junta, tried to assassinate the dictator Georgios Papadopoulos with a bomb placed along the coastal road near Vouliagmeni, south of Athens. Panagoulis, a former army officer who had deserted after the 1967 coup, had organized a resistance group. The bomb exploded as Papadopoulos's car passed, but it went off a moment too late, and the dictator was unharmed. Panagoulis was arrested nearby. He was brutally tortured and sentenced to death, but international protests led the junta to commute the sentence, and he was held in solitary confinement for years, in a cell at the Boyati military prison. He became a symbol of resistance and wrote poems in prison, sometimes in his own blood. He was released in an amnesty in 1973. After democracy was restored, he was elected to parliament in 1974. He died in a car crash in Athens in 1976, which many suspected was not an accident. His story was told by his partner, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, in her book A Man.