Tonight:
5°c
Machine gun attack on policeman in Athens
Ed Harris5 Jan 2009
A POLICE officer was shot in Athens today in an escalation of the violence that followed the killing of a teenager in the city last month.
The pre-dawn machine gun attack on a riot police unit guarding the culture ministry in the centre of the Greek capital left the officer with gunshot wounds to the thigh and shoulder. He was undergoing surgery in hospital and remained in serious condition. Two men - one with a Kalashnikov-type automatic rifle -sprayed the police unit with gunfire.
The attack comes after gunmen opened fire on a riot police bus outside a university campus near the city centre on 23December. Nobody was injured.An anonymous caller claimed responsibility on behalf of a previously unknown group.
Police have come under attack from protesters, some with petrol bombs, since the death on 6 December of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, 15, in the Exarchia district, which is popular with radicals. The policeman accused of shooting the teenager has been charged with murder. The death sparked two weeks of riots.
Patrol cars and riot police buses blocked access to much of the district today as forensic science investigators in white overalls collected evidence from the site of the shooting.
Police detained 72 people during the initial search for suspects. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the shooting.
At least six serious attacks have been carried out by little-known domestic radical groups in the past five years. Most of them were claimed by a group called Revolutionary Struggle.
Reader views (1)
I feel sorry for the ordinary Greek people caught between professional 'student' agents provocateurs and the police.
- Derek, London, 05/01/2009 13:47
Report abuse
