ATHENS – Former Golden Dawn lawmaker Nikos Michos will be released from jail after an Appeals Court suspended a six-year sentence, overruling the objection of a prosecutor who wanted him kept detained.

He was among the entire hierarchy of the neo-Nazi party’s Members of Parliament and dozens of members convicted of running a criminal gang but the court accepted his lawyer’s argument his client is suffering from cancer and other medical conditions not revealed.

Michos will not be allowed to leave the country and must present himself at his local police station twice a month, said Kathimerini. He left the party in 2017 and his lawyer noted that his client had shown political remorse.

The party’s leaders were sentenced to 13 years in prison in October 2020, and received the near-maximum penalty but one of them, Giorgos Patelis, was released after he said his child had mental health problems.

The Supreme Court in November, 2021 revoked that decision and sent it back for review but there’s been no word since on whether he was returned to jail or it still out free.

Patelis, former head of the Nikea branch of Golden Dawn, was sentenced to 10 years and 2 months and for complicity in the murder of rapper Pavlos Fyssas in 2013, which set off furious protests.

After Patelis was released, three of his former colleagues in jail said they, too should be allowed to get out but the petition by Tasos Pantazis, Anastasios Anadiotis and Aristotelis Chrysafitis was rejected by a court.

Pantazis, the former head of the Golden Dawn branch in Perama, received a 12-year sentence for participating in an attack on Egyptian fishermen at Ikonio in Perama, a western neighborhood of Piraeus, and an attack on Communist Party trade unionists.

Niki-Anastasia Mouzaki, one of the judges who heard the case, said Pantazis’ petition should be rejected because Golden Dawn, which Pantazis claimed has been broken up, is still active “but in concealed activities.”

There was a danger that Pantazis would reoffend, she added. As for the health problems he cited, they were not considered serious, high-profile prisoners in Greece sometimes released for saying they weren’t well.

Anadiotis, serving a 7-year sentence for participating in the murder of  Fyssas, said he wanted to attend a graduate studies program that had accepted his application and that it was grounds enough for him not to serve his sentence.

The court rejected the petition of Chrysafitis, also jailed for seven years for the same charges as Anadiotis, as groundless.