AFP
Greek police yesterday said they had captured far-left extremist Nikos Maziotis—one of the country’s top fugitives—after a shootout in central Athens. “Nikos Maziotis has been arrested,” a police source said, adding that a police officer had been injured in an exchange of fire near the tourist district of Monastiraki.
According to early reports, two male tourists—a German and an Australian—were also lightly hurt in the shooting, the police source said.
Maziotis himself, a leading member of defunct militant outfit Revolutionary Struggle, was more seriously injured and was taken to hospital for surgery, state news agency ANA said.
“I saw a man being taken away with his hands behind his back, he was bleeding profusely,” a witness told reporters at the scene.
“I believe he was wearing a wig,” she added.
Pictures of the scene posted online showed a man in a white shirt and grey trousers sprawled on the ground, his lower body and the sidewalk before him covered in blood. What appears to be a hairpiece lies beside his head.
Media reports said Maziotis was armed with a handgun and a grenade, which he threw at the police but failed to explode.
According to the reports, the fugitive was spotted in a camping store and attempted to flee in a taxi but was trapped in the area’s narrow streets.
Maziotis, 42, and his companion Panagiota Roupa—also a one-time member of Revolutionary Struggle—had been conditionally released from prison in 2012 and subsequently disappeared.
They have a four-year-old son who was born in an Athens hospital a few months after his parents were imprisoned in 2010.
Revolutionary Struggle, which first emerged in 2003, was once deemed by authorities to be the country’s most dangerous far-left organisation and is is listed by the EU and US as terrorist groups.
The US put a bounty on the group after it fired a rocket at the US embassy in Athens in 2007 without injuring anyone.
The outfit in April also exploded a booby-trapped car outside a Bank of Greece office in central Athens as Greece prepared to make a highly symbolic debt sale after a four-year absence. Nobody was hurt.
Other strikes include a bomb attack on the Athens Stock Exchange and several banks, and attempted assassination attempts against police and a former police minister.
Greece has seen a resurgence in extremist activity at a time when the country is struggling to emerge from a crippling six-year recession.
In November, two members of neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn were fatally shot outside an Athens district office, and another was seriously injured.
A month later, unknown attackers fired automatic rifle shots at the German ambassador’s residence in Athens without causing any injuries.In January this year, a prominent member of Greece’s deadliest extremist group November 17, Christodoulos Xiros, disappeared while on prison leave. He remains at large.
Greece had offered a total $5.4mn reward for the arrest of several wanted extremists, including Maziotis, Roupa and Xiros.
