Greek police arrest fugitive for high-profile kidnap

ATHENS (Reuters) - Police arrested Greece's most wanted fugitive, who is suspected of staging the kidnapping of a prominent Greek businessman earlier this year, officials said on Thursday.

After escaping from prison in a Hollywood-style operation involving helicopters and fast cars in 2006, Vassilis Palaiokostas is believed to have organised the kidnapping of a northern Greece industrialist in June.

"We arrested Greece's most wanted fugitive last night. Evidence shows he is also involved in Greek businessman George Mylonas' kidnapping," a police official who declined to be named told Reuters.

Mylonas, 49, chairman of the Federation of Industries of Northern Greece and CEO of aluminium company Alumil, was abducted at gunpoint outside his home and released two weeks later after his wife paid an unspecified ransom.

"It's a great relief," Mylonas' wife Nelly told Greek TV. "It is a kind of vindication for us to know who this man was."

Palaiokostas, 44, was serving a prison sentence for multiple robberies and kidnapping when accomplices whisked him out of the prison courtyard.

Police found him by tracing the marked ransom money and arrested three other men on suspicion of involvement in the Mylonas kidnapping.

(Reporting by Lefteris Papadimas and Tatiana Fragou, Writing by Renee Maltezou; Editing by MacDonald Dzirutwe)