Police Officer Injured During Athens Riots Says He Thought He Would Die

Motorised police arrive to tend to their injuried colleague during a demonstration against
LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP via Getty Images
Chris Tomlinson

A police officer brutally beaten by a mob of rioters in the Athens suburb of Nea Smyrni has said he thought he was going die.

The officer was pulled from his motorbike, allegedly by a Greek-Iraqi man, and viciously beaten by a mob, during March 9th riots following a demonstration against police brutality.

“I felt a flurry of blows from the crowd that attacked me, as they aimed for my head shouting ‘kill him,'” the officer said in his deposition. According to a report from Greek newspaper I Kathimerini, the officer was chiefly afraid the rioters would attempt to steal his firearm.

“As that large group of people were hitting me in the head to kill me, if somebody grabbed my gun, they would not hesitate to shoot me. I felt that was it, that my end was near, and the crowd would not stop hitting me until I was dead,” the officer told a Greek prosecutor.

Nea Smyrni’s mayor Stavros Tzoulakis described the rioting as being like a “war zone” earlier this month and said that many rioters were not residents of the area.

Both he and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis criticised the leftist party SYRIZA for putting out the call to protest, with the Mitsotakis saying: “SYRIZA’s official call for participation in citizen protest rallies in the midst of the pandemic is an act of great irresponsibility.”

Around ten officers were injured due to the riots. Some of the attacks caught on video, with pictures of the severely injured police officer being published by the media. The officer was forced to lie in the street, waiting for half an hour for help, as rioters had blocked off roads to ambulances.

In recent weeks, Greece has seen many violent attacks, many from supporters of convicted far-left terrorist Dimitris Koufontinas, who recently ended his hunger strike that had begun in January.

According to a Greek Ministry of Citizen Protection report, supporters of Koufontinas had been linked to at least 101 attacks, some of them involving explosives and firebombs.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com

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