As can be seen, at the relevant hours of the murder and the preparatory activities that preceded it, from the morning hours of August 26, 2022, until approximately 1:00 P.M., when the murder was completed and the escape operations from the scene of the Toyota arson were completed, media studies attest to the lack of proactive activity in subscribers 401 and 337. In fact, the data raise a real question mark around the question of whether they were in the defendant's hands at the time, since in relation to the main subscriber he uses, the 401 subscriber, incoming calls from two of his brothers are recorded at 6:44 and 11:37 a.m., and the defendant does not bother to answer them, nor even to return to them later to clarify the meaning of the attempt to talk to him. This picture fits in well with the thesis that the accuser seeks to promote, according to which the defendant was in the Mitsubishi vehicle during all those hours, busy promoting the plan to harm the deceased, and used the operational phone number 685, while the additional devices used by him routinely were left behind in his home, in an attempt to disguise his location. In this sense, the silence of the other devices used by the defendant constitutes real circumstantial evidence, which supports and strengthens all the additional evidence that has already been brought on this issue.
Alongside the aforesaid, it is clear that the power and weight of circumstantial evidence may vary from case to case, taking into account the totality of the circumstances and the alternative explanations that can be provided to it, which may be combined with a claim of innocence. Against this background, it is of great importance to examine the defendant's explanations in relation to the phenomenon of silence, to confirm or refute those explanations. However, during all six of his lengthy police interrogations, the defendant suffered, as will be described in detail below, with selective amnesia. With regard to the three phones that were seized, he admitted that they belonged to him, but claimed that he did not remember the other subscribers except for the 401 subscriber, and as for his conduct on the day of the murder, he claimed time and again that he did not remember anything. Therefore, at the interrogation stage, the defendant did not provide any explanation for the phenomenon of silence. His testimony in court had already come prepared, and then he claimed that he did not work on Fridays and in order not to be disturbed, he left his phones, including the 401 subscriber, at home, and did not hang out with them, and this was also the situation on the day of the murder [transcript of September 11, 2024, at pp. 465, 475].