Attacks launched over terror suspect

The demand of a jailed terror suspect, who is on a hunger strike, to be returned to Attica’s high-security Korydallos Prison after he was forcefully removed by EKAM special forces on Saturday and sent to a penitentiary in the central Greek town of Larissa, sparked a series of violent demonstrations, culminating in a hand grenade assault yesterday morning on a police precinct in Athens. The 6 a.m. attack in the Kaisariani suburb of Athens led to the injury of a taxi driver who was parked nearby. The grenade detonated some 20 meters away from the precinct. The driver sustained shrapnel wounds to his legs.

Initially, police were examining the possibility that the intended target of the grenade was a nearby grocery store but only realized it was the precinct when the perpetrators posted a message on an anti-establishment website later in the day.

They said the attack was aimed at the precinct in solidarity with the jailed terror suspect, Constantinos Giagtzoglou,29, who is believed to have sent the parcel bomb that seriously injured former prime minister Lucas Papademos in May 2016 and wounded an employee at the International Monetary Fund office in Paris in March that year. His removal from Korydallos on Saturday prompted inmates connected to urban guerrilla and anarchist groups to steal keys from the guards and temporarily take over several communal spaces in the facility. At the same time 100 anarchists gathered outside the Justice Ministry and clashed with riot police. On Sunday, unidentified assailants scattered fliers outside Papademos’s home in Palaio Psychico, in solidarity with Giagtzoglou, while in the evening they attacked police in Exarchia.