Three of the six arrested during raids on Monday had been previously sought as suspected members of the Conspiracy Nuclei of Fire group, which has claimed responsibility for a letter bomb campaign that saw more than a dozen booby-trapped package sent to embassies in Athens in November.
One of the devices made it to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's office in Berlin, while another, which was addressed to Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, caught fire on board a courier flight that had landed at Italy's Bologna airport. The vast majority of the letter bombs were intercepted before they exploded, and none caused any injuries.
Far-left militant and armed anarchist groups have been active in Greece for decades. But attacks have spiked in the past two years, despite the arrest of more than a dozen suspects, following the fatal police shooting of a teenager in Athens in December 2008 that led to widespread riots across the country.
Police first raided the apartments in the central city of Volos and in Athens early Monday, seizing automatic assault rifles, handguns and a revolver among other items. Police said ballistic tests on the weapons showed they had not been used in any terrorist attacks.
Further searches uncovered 600 grams of TNT explosives, notebooks detailing robbery methods and targets, fake state identity cards, two pairs of fake car license plates and hidden wireless cameras, police said.
The court procedure for the five men and one woman, aged between 24 and 32, was delayed initially because of a bomb threat at the courthouse that later turned out to be false, and later for procedural reasons.
