Former Olympian accuses Greek coach of drugs link

ATHENS (Reuters) - Former Olympic weightlifter Christos Konstantinidis has accused suspended national coach Christos Iacovou of giving banned substances to athletes, a court official said on Monday.

Konstantinidis, who represented Greece at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, was giving evidence to a judicial investigation set up to look into a recent doping scandal in which 11 members of the 14-member national weightlifting team tested positive for the anabolic steroid methyltrienolone.

He told prosecutor Andreas Karaflos that Iacovou, who has been suspended by the Greek Weightlifting Federation pending the outcome of the case, had pressed him to take banned substances in 1997.

"The former athlete told the prosecutor that Iacovou had urged him to take banned substances and that when he refused he found himself off the national team," the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Konstantinidis made identical claims in 1997 but was then forced to sign an apology for fear of losing his job with the police.

The court official said Konstantinidis told the prosecutor that despite signing the apology 11 years ago, he had never retracted his comments.

"He stood by what he had said in 1997 and he repeated those claims today again," the official said.

Nikos Kourtidis, one of the three weightlifters who did not test positive said, however, he did not believe that Iacovou would give steroids to his athletes.

All 11 weightlifters who tested positive for banned substances are due to face Karaflos in two days and face doping charges, a misdemeanor under the Greek law.

Meanwhile, Greek authorities have revealed that they intercepted a large parcel containing 91,200 anabolic steroid pills shipped from Thailand to Athens.

The shipment was originally detected by French customs officers at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Authorities allowed the recipient in an eastern suburb of Athens to be notified to collect the package but nobody turned up.

(Additional reporting by Karolos Grohmann; Editing by John Mehaffey)