Magda Fyssas exited the Athens courtroom after the verdict, raising her fists. “You did it! My son, you did it!” she shouted, her voice hoarse. Around the court, a crowd of tens of thousands chanted the name of her late son: “Pavlos lives! Smash the Nazis!”

The verdict in the criminal case against Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party was announced on Wednesday morning, after a trial that spanned five and a half years. The party was found guilty of an attack on members of a trade union, the attempted murder of a group of Egyptian fishermen, and, most famously, the murder of anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas — the son that Magda Fyssas invoked on the court steps. The case culminated with the ruling that Golden Dawn was founded and operated as a criminal organization. As news filtered out of the courtroom, a cheer ripped across the crowd.

“This is a historic decision from the justice system,” said Lefteris Papagiannakis of Golden Dawn Watch, a court observatory that has tracked every twist and turn in the half decade of trial. “It recognizes something that many of us have said for many years. And that the anti-fascist movement has been saying for decades — that Golden Dawn is a criminal organization.”