Small-scale bomb attacks against police, politicians and businessmen are frequent in Greece, which has a history of leftist violence. A prominent fatal shooting like Friday’s attack was last seen in 2010, when a Greek journalist was shot dead outside his home.
A brazen drive-by shooting that killed two young members of Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party has shocked Greeks and prompted soul-searching about whether the crisis-hit country is slipping into a “cycle of violence”.
Greece’s anti-terrorism force is investigating whether Friday’s rush hour shooting outside the party’s offices in Athens was retaliation for a fatal stabbing of an anti-fascism rapper by a Golden Dawn supporter in September, police said.
Rapper Pavlos Fissas’s death sparked protests across Greece and a government crackdown on Golden Dawn, which is widely considered neo-Nazi and is blamed for attacks against migrants.
“We cannot let this cycle of violence continue,” Makis Voridis, a senior lawmaker in Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy party, told Mega TV. “This must end here.”
“Twelve bullets against democracy,” top-selling daily Ta Nea wrote on its front page on Saturday. “The double cold-blooded murder was a coarse provocation against stability.”
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