Hotel owner charged over CO poisoning deaths

   A public prosecutor on Saturday charged the 34-year-old owner of the Hotel Nepheli in Thessaloniki's Panorama district with two counts manslaughter through negligence and causing bodily harm through negligence after two guests died of carbon monoxide poisoning in the hotel. The charges are being prosecuted as misdemeanours.

    The hotel owner was released after he was charged.

    The manslaughter charges relate to the deaths of two young men aged 27 and 28 years old, one of them a father of one, who were found dead in different rooms within the hotel over a period of 24 hours and proved to have died of inhaling carbon monoxide fumes in their sleep. The second charge relates to a third guest staying in the hotel that felt unwell and lost consciousness.

    The prosecutor said that the evidence file submitted to the public prosecutor was judged incomplete and returned to the Panorama police station, which was asked to include the coroner's report on the two deaths and the experts' report on the hotel's central heating system.

    The hotel owner has claimed that the technicians installing a new gas-fuelled central heating system in the hotel four years earlier had failed to inform him that he needed to carry out yearly maintenance and that he had two maintenance technicians on his staff.

    The Central Macedonia Tourism Directorate is expected to issue a decision temporarily closing down the hotel within the next 24 hours.