Greek anti-terror investigators have apprehended a man in link with a deadly explosion in Athens, police expressed caution of “a new generation of terrorists” at work. A recent blast in an apartment in the capital, which claimed the life of a man and seriously wounded a woman, is suspected to have been forced by the accidental detonation of a homemade bomb.
Police sources said they had recognised the dead man from his dismembered remains as a 36-year-old from the port city of Piraeus who had been previously charged in Germany.
His fingerprints were in the global database of Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, the sources expressed.
Investigators have also extended a case for alleged participation in a terrorist association and committing terrorist actions against the injured woman, 33, who was hospitalized under police supervision, and a 30-year-old woman who remains at large.
He is believed to have a relationship with one of the two women wanted in the matter but has denied having anything to do with the explosion, police stated. Police said that a search of the flat produced two handguns, wigs and face masks among other materials. Greek police sources said that investigations were continuing and that the deceased and those arrested were probably members of “a new generation of terrorists.”
Moreover, Police in Greece have captured large quantities of explosives and firearms following raids in Athens seeking to dismantle what authorities described as a powerful criminal weapons storage and distribution network in the country’s capital. Five people were charged after the raids at five locations uncovered a big stockpile of weaponry including 60 kilograms (132 pounds) of ammonium dynamite as well as military-grade explosives, detonators and coils of slow-burning fuse cord. Police also took assault rifles, guns, about 6,000 rounds of ammunition, gold coins and more than 23,000 euros in currency.
The nation has a decades-old history of far-left extremism concerning small urban groups.
The shadow November 17 group, anointed after an anti-junta student revolt, was behind the 1975 killing of the CIA’s Athens station Chief Richard Welch and asserted responsibility for assassinating 23 people in scores of raids on U.S., British, Turkish and Greek targets between the 1970s and 1990s.
