Groups of mostly masked protestors threw firebombs at nearby riot police near central Athens’ Exarchia on Wednesday evening, a day after a one-time special police guard was set free after serving roughly a decade in jail for fatally shooting a teenager in December 2008, only a few blocks away from where the violence occurred.
Epaminondas Korkoneas was freed after an appellate court confirmed his first instance intentional homicide conviction, on the one hand, but then handed down a reduced 13-year sentence. The new Mitsotakis government and critics of the previous leftist SYRIZA government have angrily blamed the last-minute revisions in Greece’s penal code – the trend being to downgrade certain offenses and offer more lenient sentencing terms – as allowing for the early release.
A protest rally in the area was held in the afternoon, both to condemn the perpetrator’s freeing and in memory of the victim, Alexandros Grigoropoulos.
