The monk and member of the fraternity of St. Avvakum monastery, Varnavas, are accused by the two accused monks as the man who allegedly videotaped them illegally and delivered the “incriminating” material to Metropolitan Tamasos Isaias.
In a letter from the lawyers of the two monks on holiday to the investigation committee of the Holy Synod, it is stated that “in the case under review, the disputed illegally obtained evidence are videos taken from the closed-circuit surveillance cameras of the Holy Monastery of St. Avvakum. The letter also states, the scenes did not come from a video camera operated by any particular person.
Therefore, it is added in the letter of the lawyers of the two monks, the fragmentary shots, which are in the file of the case under review, were not taken by the person who presented them (to Metropolitan Tamasos) but were apparently stolen by this person (the monk Barnabas). from the monitoring system or otherwise illegally remotely.
As it appears implicitly from the letter, the two monks acknowledge the existence of the videos and their authenticity, although they consider them illegal and fragmentary, as they believe they cannot be used against them in the ongoing investigation by the investigative committee.
In the same letter from their lawyers, it is stated that Father Barnabas, a brother of the Holy Monastery, could see all the perimeter cameras and those located inside the Church and in the tomb. He could not, it added, see the office cameras and could not play recorded video.
The following is also recorded in the letter: Then, around the end of December 2023, following the order of the monastery, the access of Fr. Moni, existing passwords were removed by order (for security reasons) and all files were deleted from the closed circuit, while new passwords were created. However, when changing the access codes to the circuit remotely, it was found that strangely the system was not working and forced with new procedures the entire circuit was reset from scratch and a new administrator was appointed with new security codes.
Finally, on March 3, 2024, a Sunday, following an order, the three cameras from the offices were turned off and all data was deleted from the circuit’s disks.
The letter also makes the following claim: Given that none of our clients have provided the video recordings, the only one left is the former brother of the Holy Monastery, Father Barnabas. We repeat that he did not use his own camera to take the provided videos, but they came into his possession in an illegal way and were otherwise secured remotely again in an illegal way, since he did not have the access codes. Therefore, the specific illegal means of evidence do not meet the conditions of the article of the Statute of the Church and for this reason they are illegal and their use is prohibited both for the proof of guilt and for the imposition of the penalty.