He was promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1986 and, after serving on the staff at HQ United Kingdom Land Forces, commanded his battalion in Northern Ireland, for which he was mentioned in despatches, and then Hong Kong.
[1][2] Saunders was attacked and shot dead by two men on a motorcycle while driving through Athens traffic on his way to work at the British Embassy at 07:48 on 8 June 2000.
17N revealed in a second proclamation dated 11 December 2000, also published in Eleftherotypia,[6] that it had erroneously believed Saunders's embassy-issued white Rover was armoured.
On 29 June 2002, 17N member Savvas Xiros (hitherto unknown to police) was gravely injured when a time bomb he was planting exploded prematurely in Piraeus.
In his 2009 memoir "Reluctant Spy" (Bantam), former CIA officer John Kiriakou wrote of driving past Saunders's blood-stained car the morning of 8 June.
He claimed that the reason for his abrupt departure from Greece in August 2000 was the discovery that Greek urban guerrilla organization 17N had been stalking him instead of Saunders.
(p83) One of many attempts to implicate the U.S. government as the sponsor of 17N appeared in December 2005, when Kleanthis Grivas published an article in To Proto Thema, a Greek Sunday newspaper.
The State Department also highlighted the fact that, in the case of Richard Welch, "Grivas bizarrely accuses the CIA of playing a role in the assassination of one of its own senior officials" as well as the Greek government's statements to the effect that the "stay behind" network had been dismantled in 1988.
[8] Saunders was buried with a Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone in the churchyard of the parish church of Melbury Osmond, Dorset, close to where he had previously lived.