Group claims car bomb attack
An urban guerrilla group linking itself to the Informal Anarchist Federation on Thursday said it had planted a bomb in a car belonging to an employee of Nafplio Prison in Argos in the northern Peloponnese on Wednesday. No one was injured in the attack, which caused some damage to nearby cars and buildings. In a post on anarchist website Indymedia, the group said it was acting in concert with Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, a terror group which last month claimed to have planted a gas canister bomb that destroyed a car belonging to the governor of the capital’s Korydallos Prison. The statement claims that Wednesday’s attack was intended to protest conditions at the correctional facility.
Con men nabbed.
Two men aged 29 and 37 were arrested in Larissa, central Greece, yesterday following a complaint by an elderly woman who said they had tried to swindle her. The suspects are believed to have conned a number of elderly residents in the area out of money. Since October 2012, they are said to have defrauded their victims out of 13,450 euros in cash and 9,500 euros’ worth of jewelry by posing as acquaintances of relations requiring financial help. The two were caught after officers spotted them in a car that had been identified by a woman who said the suspects had conned her into handing over 600 euros.
Gavalas sentenced.
An Athens court yesterday handed a seven-year suspended sentence to fashion entrepreneur Lakis Gavalas after he was found guilty of owing some 17 million euros to the state, while his sister and business partner Nota received a six-year suspended sentence. The court rejected Gavalas’s request to transfer his firm’s eastern Attica headquarters to the state in exchange for a writeoff of its debts on the grounds that the property was already mortgaged. The siblings were not expected to be released from custody until the weekend due to a technicality and were ordered to report to their local police precincts regularly.
Debtor arrests.
Two men were arrested in northern Greece yesterday for failing to pay a total of nearly 4 million euros in debts to the state. One is a Thessaloniki furniture retailer with a debt of 1.9 million euros. The other owns a store selling bathroom fittings in Kastoria and owes 2 million euros.
Swindling cabbies.
Twenty-seven taxi drivers will be facing prosecutors after being found to have illegally altered their meters so that they could charge higher fares, or who had disabled their receipt-issuing machines. Most of the arrests, part of a police crackdown yesterday on unscrupulous cabbies, were made at popular spots for picking up fares, such as metro and train stations, and concerned drivers who had rigged their meters.