Cell Search – Dark Nights

Greece: Text by Fotis Tziotzis for the Greek FBI’s hounds

Posted on 2025/10/02 - 2025/10/02 by darknights

Yesterday at noon, the Greek FBI* conducted a targeted surprise search of my cell and, after a thorough investigation, managed to seize letters of solidarity from comrades abroad as well as an MP3 stick with my favorite music well hidden, which means that a resounding blow was dealt to the music industry!

As if that weren’t enough, a case file was compiled with various sticks, videos, and two empty SIM cards found on other prisoners.

This is not the first time that such a case file has been compiled by the same “hounds,” as two months earlier, during a raid on Korydallos prison where I was being held for trial, a hinge that had fallen from a window was found in my cell and considered a “weapon.”

The constant targeting of me by the cops cannot stand in the way of my progress inside and outside the prison walls.

They also have the support of some websites, which, with exaggerations and guided lies, try to throw mud at me, attributing various imaginative qualities to me.

I don’t want to ramble on and on, I just want to emphasize that I am “here,” fighting and unshakeable in my beliefs.

See you on the streets of Freedom!

Fotis Tziotzis

Nigrita Prison

Source: athens.indymedia

DN Note

* ‘Greek FBI’, Διεύθυνση Αντιμετώπισης Οργανωμένου Εγκλήματος (ΔΑΟΕ), Directorate for Combating Organized Crime, is a special service of the Greek Police, setup in 2024, responsible for dismantling organized criminal groups and prosecuting drug and financial crimes. They have a wide scope that includes mafia, drug dealing networks, robbery, even hooligans, but now even anarchists in a further attempt to describe the actions of them as ‘criminality’ to deligitimise their struggle. Not that we as an anarchist collective have any problem with what is described as ‘criminality’.
More than 500 members of the new agency had their names leaked on the internet only one week after it first began its repressive work.

UK: Wildfires will begin: An interview with Toby Shone

Posted on 2025/09/18 - 2025/09/18 by darknights

1st June 2025

The former political prisoner talks about his anarchism, the 325 project and resisting the physical and mental jails that surround us all.

~ Interviewed by Elizabeth Vasileva ~

You recently spoke about the importance of solidarity and connections, between prisoners and with their supporters on the outside. Can you give us any examples of this kind of mutual or collective empowerment in the pushback against prison’s continuous repression?

Shortly before I was released in 2024, violent cell searches by a tactical unit of prison guards known as the National Search Team took place on C-wing of HMP Garth in Leyland, where I was being held. The NST took over the wing with dogs and riot gear. Cell by cell the raid took place with a lot of pointlessly brutal drama. In ones and twos we were handcuffed and placed in a locked wet room. Some prisoners were beaten, abused and a lot of our things were trashed. Some of the guys fought back, flooded their cells, banged their doors or played music really loud as a protest. The next day the whole wing refused to go back into their cells after the early morning unlock hour. As a cacophonous and unruly mob we demanded the immediate return of seized items, the replacement of damaged items and denounced the violence. This lead to the screws backing off. There was nothing at that moment that the screws could do because we all acted together, and without any leader. At the end of the lunch period, the stop-out ended.

Similar things happened in my experience when one of the prisoners was killed by depression or hopelessness. Demonstrations outside the prisons where I was held also were a strong experience that had an impact upon the guards and us. Especially when the fireworks exploded across the night sky and the comrades outside were militant. I found other prisoners to be generally supportive of each other in the roughly anti-system and criminal environment. Whenever I was transferred or moved to a different cell, the local guys usually would come to check if I was okay and if I needed anything. I helped other guys with their legal cases or prison admin, and tried to find common points of interest and subversion. We’d try to back each other, and if I had some problem, the guys would be voicing their demands too. There’s refusals and kick-offs being made in most of the prisons around the country each day about conditions and treatment. I lost track of the number of prison labour refusals and walkouts I heard about when I was inside, they are very common, as is getting on the netting that separates the landings to protest about treatment and poor conditions.

When I heard that comrades outside were carrying out revolutionary solidarity, that is when I felt our power inside the prison, I can say. From hearing about the direct actions with the Adream case in Chile, France, Italy, Indonesia and around the world, to the phone-call interventions that I was able to make from inside prison to meetings of comrades on the outside, I could feel the warmth from the comrades. Also knowing about the censored letters and books, the solidarity funds and benefit events, it was great.

For readers who don’t know 325, what can you tell us about the project and its content?

325 is an anarchist network of counter-information and direct action. In November 2020, Dutch counter-terrorist police took down the nostate.net server which held the 325 website, upon request from their German and English colleagues. The website was a long-running information clearing house of general news, reports, communiques, publications, event listings, etc. Mostly the website covered Europe, Latin America and South East Asia. 325 is also a hard-copy magazine which comes out on an intermittent basis, and dozens of publications have been published by the collective, including the newsletter Dark Nights, which has it’s own website.

Over the years, 325 has participated in an evolving participatory international network based on direct action and the support of prisoners, as well as providing space for various tendencies of anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-civilisation groups. In recent issues of the magazine the analysis has shifted slightly to the profound new industrial changes in production and technology, such as artificial intelligence, life sciences and automation. The archive of the 325 site is an important document of social and armed revolutionary struggle over a number of years in Europe and internationally. The project started in 2003 and continues. Continue reading “UK: Wildfires will begin: An interview with Toby Shone” →

France: Some news about Ivan, an inmate in Villepinte prison

Posted on 2023/04/15 - 2023/04/15 by darknights

Some news about Ivan, an inmate in Villepinte prison (France, April 8, 2023)

Some news about Ivan

Hello,
I am writing to give some news about my detention and investigation.

The “attentions” that the prison administration (and/or the preliminary investigation judge?) show me continue. More reprisals for my hunger strikes? Who knows.

In any case, on February 14 there was the third search of my cell (after those of December 6 and January 9). Around 7:30 p.m. the ERIS (anti-terror cops) arrived, with helmets, balaclavas and shields. There were a dozen of them, one officer was holding papers, on the first one I could see my photograph. Ours was the only cell searched in this section (but they let a dog through the corridors), two other cells in another section, I don’t know in the other buildings. The prison warden, Michael Merci, and the assistant warden were also there, watching, from behind the glass doors.
As soon as we were out of the cell, they handcuffed us, me and my concellino (who had been here in the section for just a week) and took us to the shower room, on the ground floor, for the traditional body search. We were locked in the showers during the two-hour cell search.
They found a cell phone with a charger. On Tuesday, March 21, I then went to the disciplinary board. As punishment, I am deprived of the spesina for 30 days.

On March 30, same thing. The ELAC (the prison security “squad”) arrived and the story started again.

As for the investigation, in recent months new elements have been incorporated into the dossier.
The most significant is that the police were able to gain access to my computers, even though they were encrypted.
The one at work, on which Windows is installed, is encrypted with BitLocker. A report incorporated with the file earlier says that they had already tried to access it during my police detention, but had not succeeded. But in September, the Brigade d’appui en téléphonie, cyber-investigation et analyse criminelle (Brigade of support in telephony, cyber-investigation and criminal analysis) sent SDAT a copy of the hard drive. In the report, they explain only that they booted the computer with a USB stick and then used the AccesData FTK imager 3.3.05 program to copy the hard disk. But they do not mention the decryption operation itself.

My personal computer, running Ubuntu 18, is encrypted with Luks (the password is more than twenty characters: letters, digits, punctuation marks…). I did not find in the file any indication of the means they used to decrypt it, but again they made a copy of the hard drive. There are even files that had been deleted and e-mails that had been downloaded with Thunderbird (and then deleted).
They found nothing that could be related to the fires I am accused of. But I think the very fact that they were able to have access to encrypted hard drives with programs supposed to be inviolable should be known as widely as possible.

My mail continues to be severely slowed down (on average, I receive letters a month and a half to two months after they are mailed): the preliminary investigation judge reads all the letters I get and write. Four of my letters were photocopied and incorporated into the file: two that I had written to people from the anti-prison magazine l'”Envolée,” one addressed to Boris (the comrade from Besançon who is in the hospital following the fire in his cell, in the Nancy prison, in August 2021) and the one, addressed to the Gare, near Bure, in which I explained that in “my” dossier appears the complaint that the editor-in-chief of the regional newspaper l'”Est Républicain” filed against the administrators of the website burebure. info for reproducing the claim of a car fire at the newspaper (a fire for which I am accused)

Otherwise, my preventive detention has been extended until mid-June.

I am fine, my spirits are high and I am sorry I cannot be in the square these days.
A thought in solidarity for Alfredo (and all the compas in prison).
Solidarity is the attack!
Long live anarchy!

Ivan
April 8, 2023

* * *

Comrade’s address:

Ivan Alocco
N. d’ecrou 46355
Maison d’Arrêt de Villepinte
40, Avenue Vauban
93420 Villepinte
France

Source: La Nemesi

Italy: 25/09 in Genoa against Anti-Anarchist Repression EN/IT

Posted on 2022/09/18 - 2022/09/18 by darknights

Squeezed in the grip of health emergencies, wars, increasingly fierce domestic repression, energy crisis, economic recession, systematic erosion of individual freedoms, dismantling of acquired rights and widening social gaps, we are asked for an act of blind loyalty like that of the dog that, though clubbed, does not shy away from its master’s oppression, of resigned submission to the inevitability of these events: the chorus of politicians of all colors, of masters, of regime shouters re-propose to us the fatuous promise of the solution of the problems that grip the daily lives of most, of the common well-being, to be obtained, as it happens, through “tears and blood” sacrifices to which we should also, ironically, grant our consent in the electoral ballet. It seems to us that this spectacle is a painful rerun. The assent and social cohesion demanded of us are aimed more at feeding the interests of political apparatuses and the business dealings of the masters of the economy, these already closely coalesced at several levels for some time, who thrive on the backs bent by the chain of labor and necessity. To us anarchist comrades, libertarians, rebels, refractory to authority, the way forward seems clear: to resolutely oppose against this power that suffocates us and against the state, the men and women who represent it, against prisons and all places where anyone is imprisoned, against the political and economic institutions that speculate, plundering the planet’s natural resources and degrading our lives. We claim the necessity of the conflict against this state of affairs because we are aware that the oppression we experience is the result of processes that unfold historically in a well-defined way, that this system of exploitation will not exhaust itself, that it is up to us, here and now, to pursue the idea of freedom to which we aspire. And it is to this clash that we bring back, without victimhood, the meaning of repression when it targets us: repression and prisons will continue to exist as long as there is a state to bring down and that will do everything not to fall, exposing any illusion of democratic justice. This confrontation is burying in prison so many and so many of our most generous comrades, Anna, Alfredo, Juan, Monica, Francisco, Davide, Claudio, decades in jail, whole lives facing isolation, censorship, physical and psychological violence of rigid detention regimes. Yet they defend tooth and nail the idea they keep alive in their beleaguered hearts. We do not want to be outdone; their courage and determination inspire our paths out here. Since May 5, our comrade Alfredo Cospito has been locked up in the Bancali prison near Sassari in 41 bis, an extremely severe detention regime that involves almost total isolation, absence of sociability, and almost complete censorship of correspondence, the recording of the monthly 10-minute phone call and the interview reduced to one hour a month behind a partition screen without the possibility of any physical contact, constant body and cell searches, the very reduced availability of even everyday objects (clothes, books, paper and pen) and always subject to the arbitrariness of the jailers. Such a penalizing and fundamentally vindictive measure is clearly aimed at silencing the voice and ideas of a comrade who, over the years, has made a decisive contribution, with his theoretical critique and practice, to the anarchist debate; to annihilate him because he perseveres with determination and dignity in his path of struggle; to dampen, with the specter of exemplary punishment, the initiative of comrades outside in solidarity. In Genoa, three comrades who did not spare themselves in supporting Alfredo and the other imprisoned comrades are affected by special surveillance orders requested by the usual prosecutor Federico Stalker Manotti, in an attempt to isolate them and inhibit those close to them; a further request for surveillance has been issued for another comrade in Genoa, and a hearing against him will be held on September 28. These are the reasons why we have decided to take to the streets in Genoa next September 25, a date, that of the elections, which is symbolic of the farce of the social contract being renewed on the skin of all of us; if the machine of domination advances with all its apparatuses to engulf the lives of comrades, in our most disruptive desire for freedom, hatred of authority and active solidarity we can find adequate levers to crack the enemy’s front. We invite you to join us. When repression becomes tight and lashing, the response must be clear, determined and consistent. Let us break the isolation into which they would like to plunge our comrades. Let us deploy ideas, forces, strategies in response to the anti-anarchist campaign that the state has been waging for almost a decade now.

Solidarity is a weapon, let’s use it!!!

Out Alfredo from 41bis. Against all prisons

Continue reading “Italy: 25/09 in Genoa against Anti-Anarchist Repression EN/IT” →

UK: Statement by anarchist comrade Toby Shone after strip and cell search by G4S Parc

Posted on 2022/05/19 by darknights

The cell search described by Toby Shone is believed to be an attempt at intimidation by G4S Parc following a month of concerted efforts by those on the outside to call to account Gareth Kite, Post Room Manager, for withholding mail and books from Toby. Although Kite has responded by dribbling Toby small amounts of mail, some of it from months ago – whilst continuing to claim that Toby has no mail – we know that there is a lot of mail outstanding, both from HMP Bristol and HM Prison Parc, and particularly letters and cards of solidarity from political groups and letter-writing nights. Gareth Kite can be contacted at secretariat.parc@uk.g4s.com

18 MAY 2022
HM Prison Parc

This morning at around 9.40, a team from the Security Department, entered my cell, subjected me to a strip search and proceeded to turn my pad upside down, going through all my possessions – legal papers, letters, photos and books – in the name of “intelligence” that they had received. They refused to say what this “intelligence” consisted of and told me to contact my lawyer. Before I could do so, they removed me and put me in a sterile cell until they had finished the invasion. Suffice to say, these lackeys of G4S didn’t find anything, but decided in their impotence to take away a set of shelves, rip a solidarity card I received from London off the wall, take my duvet, my radio antenna and a bottle of medicine for a skin condition issued by the doctor. Incidents like this are part of daily life for us in prison, but as a revolutionary prisoner, I will never let such provocations pass unanswered. One of the team saw fit to ask me, “Where is your Koran?” for which many things could be said, but I’ll leave it there for now as rhetoric is cheap and facts are self-evident.

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” Oscar Wilde

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