Husband of Brit mum tortured to death by burglars tells how he ‘begged’ for their lives as he returns to scene
THE husband of Brit mum tortured to death by burglars told cops they begged for their lives as she screamed for help.
Heartbreaking video has shown Charalambos Anagnostopoulos, 32, returning to the Athens house where a group of armed men murdered his 20-year-old wife Caroline Crouch.
The sadistic thieves killed her while forcing her to reveal where £30,000-worth of cash and jewellery was kept at her home in Athens.
Anagnostopoulos, a helicopter pilot, survived after he was tied to a chair and blind-folded with duct tape at the home in the Glyka Nera suburb of the city.
The robbers reportedly held a gun to the 11-month-old girl’s head in a sickening bid to get the mum to reveal where the money was kept.
Heartbreaking video has shown him returning back to his home accompanied by police officers after speaking to detectives investigating the sickening murder.
He later briefly spoke to reporters as he got into his car.
Anagnostopoulos has told investigators, the terrified couple pleaded with the sadistic thieves not to hurt them and their baby, as his wife screamed.
“We begged them not to hurt us,” he told police, in a statement widely reported in the Greek media.
“They kept telling me ‘where is the money, eh?’. I told them right away where I had hidden the money, so that the torment could end quickly.
“I heard my wife constantly screaming for help tied to the bed as I was tied up. The baby was crying, my wife was crying.”
He said that despite telling him where the valuables where, the gang roamed house to find more money and jewellery.
But then his wife’s screaming stopped as the gang fled with the money, which was to pay for a plot of land, and the jewellery.
“Suddenly they left the room, while I stopped listening to my wife’s voice,” he said
“What I and my family and my wife’s family went through, let no one go through it again . “
In her final Instagram video, Caroline is seen holding and kissing her baby daughter at the beach.
Weeks later, three robbers forced their way into the family’s two storey house at 4.30am after breaking a CCTV camera and hanging the family’s dog by its own leash.
According to news site Ta Nea, a fourth criminal kept watch outside the home as the other three found the couple sleeping with their child in an attic bedroom.
Caroline was tied to the bed using a t-shirt and was strangled to death by the depraved gang to stop her screaming for her baby’s safety.
Some conflicting reports say husband Charalambos was found sleeping in another room by the killers.
According to The Times, who spoke to a senior police officer, the pilot tried to fight the gang off before he was tied to a chair.
Once the armed men fled, Charalambos managed to free himself to find his baby daughter crying beside the lifeless body of her mother, reports say.
An investigator said: “The woman appears to have been strangled by the robbers in their bid to locate jewellery and cash the couple may have had in their home.
“We are waiting for the coroner’s report to establish if there was any other type of assault.”
Local site Proto Thema reports that the distraught husband told police about the moment he was attacked by the three men.
He said: “It was shortly after five. I saw three hooded men. One was tall. They shouted and threatened in broken Greek.
“They tied me to a chair and then went on my wife.”
The same report quotes the pilot as telling police he was sleeping downstairs during the break-in
“When I managed to break free, I rushed upstairs to the attic to find my wife on the floor facing down, and the baby next to her wailing,” he reportedly told cops.
Charalambos called the police around 6am.
The Greek government has issued a £258,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the men, reports The Dawn.
Police said it appears that the robbers were experienced and likely watched the couple for some time before the raid.
The gangsters reportedly broke into the home through a window in the basement before killing the family dog in the first floor of the property.
When they fled the home, they left the dead dog hanging from a fence outside the house.
Officers are trawling through CCTV to see how the gang got away and whether they were in the area before the raid.
Police spokesman Theodoros Chronopoulos described the murder as a “heinous crime, committed with extreme ferocity.”
He added: “We’ve seen several other ugly murders throughout the years. But this was extremely brutal and violent.”
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The murdered woman was born in Greece but had a British passport, the police said.
Mrs Crouch was a student at the University of Piraeus and on her husband’s Instagram account the couple are pictured smiling with their baby.
Greeks are used to gangland killings but the strangling of the woman in front of her child has led to shock in the country.
