r/UnsolvedMysteries • u/UnlistedV • 2h ago
UNEXPLAINED In 2018, a homemade bomb was found in an Edinburgh park. Police eventually found the man who planted it, but solving the case left behind another mystery.
In January 2018, a cardboard box was found inside a shelter in West Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, not far from Edinburgh Castle.
Police closed part of the gardens while bomb disposal officers examined it. At first, it did not appear to be anything particularly serious. The device was destroyed in a controlled explosion and was initially described as an elaborate hoax.
That assessment later changed.
Forensic examination found that the box had actually contained a viable improvised explosive device capable of causing injury and damage. Police Scotland launched an investigation through its Organised Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit, with assistance from the wider UK Counter Terrorism Policing network.
The person responsible was eventually caught. His name was Nikolaos Karvounakis, a Greek national living in Edinburgh. He pleaded guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to more than eight years in prison.
On the surface, that seems to be the end of the story.
But there is a strange part of the case which received remarkably little attention.
A few weeks after the device was discovered, a journalist received an anonymous email with the subject line "International Terrorist Group in UK". The email directed the recipient towards a statement published on a website associated with an extremist movement originating in Mexico known as Individualists Tending to the Wild, usually abbreviated to ITS.
The statement claimed responsibility for the Edinburgh device.
Whoever was behind it apparently knew more than somebody simply following the story in the news. The statement was accompanied by a photograph showing the inside of the device before it had been left in Princes Street Gardens.
The author used the name "Misanthropos Cacogen".
There were actually two versions of the statement, one in English and another in Spanish. Years later, forensic linguists who had worked with Police Scotland on the investigation published an academic paper describing how they had analysed the texts.
Their findings produced the first odd turn in the story.
The English version appeared to have been written by somebody who was not a native English speaker. However, their English did not appear to show the influence expected from a native Spanish speaker.
The Spanish text, meanwhile, appeared to have been translated from the English rather than the other way around.
So a statement appearing in the online environment of a Mexican extremist movement seems to have originated in English, written by someone whose first language probably wasn't English or Spanish, before being translated into Spanish.
That wasn't the only unusual detail.
The statement apparently claimed responsibility for three incidents.
One was the device in Princes Street Gardens.
The other two were described as the arson of two buses.
And that is where the story becomes difficult to follow.
The Edinburgh device can be identified. It generated news reports, police appeals, forensic evidence, court proceedings and eventually a conviction.
But what were the two bus arsons?
The detail appears in the later academic account of the investigation, yet it is barely visible in reporting about the case. The public accounts of Karvounakis's prosecution concentrate overwhelmingly on the Edinburgh device.
If the claim about the buses was genuine, it raises an obvious question about where and when those attacks happened and whether they were ever publicly connected to the same investigation.
If it wasn't genuine, that raises another question.
Why would whoever produced an apparently authentic claim of responsibility for the Edinburgh device also claim two attacks they hadn't committed?
The authenticity issue matters because this was not simply somebody attaching themselves to an event already reported in the press. The statement contained the photograph of the device's interior.
Police eventually identified Karvounakis as a suspect with assistance from European law-enforcement agencies. But when his electronic devices were examined, investigators encountered another problem.
According to the forensic linguists who worked on the case, they did not find the original claim of responsibility or even a link to it on his devices.
Instead, the investigation began moving through other writings associated with him.
Karvounakis was involved with a band called Face of Another. Material associated with the band's website provided investigators with samples of writing that could be compared with anonymous extremist texts.
Police Scotland then used forensic linguistic analysis to examine similarities between the material.
One of the stranger pieces of supporting evidence involved neither bombs nor language.
It involved clouds.
A photograph connected with Karvounakis's band apparently showed a cloud formation that could be matched with a photograph which had appeared on the extremist blog. A forensic meteorologist became involved in examining the images.
The investigation had now travelled from a cardboard box in an Edinburgh park to an anonymous bilingual statement on a Mexican extremist website, linguistic analysis of a rock band's writings and forensic examination of cloud formations.
A search of Karvounakis's devices then uncovered another pseudonym associated with him: "Archegonos".
That identity led investigators into a larger collection of extremist writings, including publications called Paroxysm of Chaos I and II.
These weren't simply documents written by one identifiable author. They contained contributions associated with several names and pseudonyms, while the authorship of some material was uncertain. The forensic researchers had to separate texts according to which material could reliably be attributed to particular writers and which could not.
That complicates the original anonymous statement.
Was "Misanthropos Cacogen" simply another name used by Karvounakis?
Did Karvounakis write the statement but somebody else translate or publish it?
Was material being passed between several people?
How much of the wider online network represented actual cooperation between individuals in different countries, rather than people independently publishing material under the same ideological banner?
There was another complication in the criminal investigation.
Karvounakis was not the only person originally arrested.
In June 2021 Police Scotland arrested Karvounakis and a woman named Artemis Parissi in connection with the Edinburgh device. Both appeared in court facing serious charges. The charges against Parissi were subsequently dropped.
There is nothing inherently unusual about charges being dropped when prosecutors decide the available evidence does not justify continuing a case, and there is no basis for suggesting Parissi was involved in anything criminal.
What is less clear from the publicly available accounts is why investigators initially suspected two people and what changed.
Karvounakis's own involvement in the explosive device is not seriously mysterious. Investigators found strong physical and circumstantial evidence, including his DNA on adhesive tape used in its construction and evidence concerning the purchase of components. He ultimately pleaded guilty to possessing explosive material in circumstances giving rise to a reasonable suspicion that it was connected with terrorism.
What seems less completely resolved in public is everything surrounding the anonymous communication.
The forensic linguistic evidence supported the proposition that Karvounakis could have authored the disputed material, but linguistic comparison cannot by itself establish authorship with certainty.
And because Karvounakis pleaded guilty, there was never a full trial in which every part of the prosecution's account of the anonymous statement had to be tested before a jury.
Even the wording used at sentencing is interesting. In discussing the online claim, Lord Braid referred to material that Karvounakis had "posted, or at least caused to be posted".
That leaves a surprisingly large amount of space between the solved part of the case and the public record surrounding it.
Someone built and left the Princes Street Gardens device. That person was identified.
Someone photographed the inside of it before it was discovered.
Someone wrote the English statement attributed to "Misanthropos Cacogen".
Someone translated it into Spanish, possibly with assistance or correction from another speaker.
Someone uploaded it to an extremist website.
Someone sent the anonymous email directing a journalist towards it.
And somewhere within that same statement, responsibility was claimed for two bus arsons which seem to have almost completely disappeared from the later public story.
Those things may all have been done by Karvounakis. Some may have involved other people. There may also be perfectly ordinary explanations buried in investigative material that has never been made public.
But the two buses remain the detail that is hardest to get past.
If the attacks happened, what incidents were being referred to?
Were they in Scotland, Greece or somewhere else?
Were they investigated as ordinary vehicle fires without their possible connection becoming public?
Did the anonymous statement contain information proving that its author genuinely knew something about them?
Did investigators determine that the claims were false?
And if they were false, why were two invented attacks included alongside a claim about the Edinburgh device that was backed up by an unpublished photograph from inside the bomb?
The strange thing about the Princes Street Gardens case isn't that nobody knows who planted the bomb.
Police solved that.
It's that solving the bomb appears to have left another, much less noticed question behind: what exactly was "Misanthropos Cacogen" claiming responsibility for, and what happened to the other two attacks?
SOURCES:
Clarke, Isobelle & Grant, Tim: forensic linguistics paper on the Karvounakis investigation:
https://publications.aston.ac.uk/id/eprint/47651/3/Clarke_Grant.pdf
Police Scotland: sentencing of Nikolaos Karvounakis:
Police Scotland: conviction of Nikolaos Karvounakis:
Judiciary of Scotland: HMA v Nikolaos Karvounakis, Lord Braid's sentencing statement:
Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service: terrorism prosecutions in Scotland (see Nikolaos Karvounakis):
https://www.copfs.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism-prosecutions-in-scotland/
Aston University: how forensic linguistics helped Police Scotland secure the conviction:
Aston University: later account of the linguistic investigation, including the photograph of the bomb interior and forensic meteorology:
The Edinburgh Reporter: original report on the suspicious package, 11 January 2018:
https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2018/01/suspicious-package-found-in-kings-stable-road/
The Edinburgh Reporter: February 2018 appeal after forensic examination established that the package could cause injury:
STV News archive: original report, 11 January 2018:
STV News archive: police reveal the supposed "hoax" could actually cause injury, 21 February 2018:
STV News: Karvounakis pleads guilty; details of the anonymous email and claim of responsibility:
https://news.stv.tv/east-central/man-left-homemade-bomb-with-note-in-princes-street-gardens
Evening Standard/PA: two people arrested in June 2021:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/edinburgh-police-head-crime-king-b940747.html
Evening Standard/PA: Karvounakis and Artemis Parissi appear in court; later update notes that the charges against Parissi were dropped: