A married couple living in Keratea and both serving in the police force were attacked by unidentified individuals armed with petrol bombs after midnight on Friday, while they were in their family home with their four children.
The incident occurred at 45 minutes after midnight at the couple's home on the junction of Nato Avenue and Mihail Dilesi road. The attack started a fire that destroyed three vehicles parked outside the family's home before it was put out by the fire department. Two of the cars incinerated in the attack belonged to the two police officers and a third to a friend.
The couple both work in the police force, the man as the chief of the Glyka Nera police station and the woman at the Keratea passport office. They have been living in the same house since 1994.
The attack came after the settlement of Keratea on Thursday became the scene of violent clashes between police and local residents protesting against plans to site a landfill in the area. Tear gas was used on the protestors, causing several people to faint due to the heavy use of chemicals, while several protestors were injured in six hours of clashes with police when they attacked road crews sent to repair the main road into Keratea, using stones, sticks and petrol bombs.
The road crews, accompanied by police and a public prosecutor, had been sent to restore damage to the main road leading off Lavrio Avenue into Keratea, where unidentified individuals had dug a 2-metre deep trench the previous night under cover of darkness and blocked access to the settlement.
Local residents opposing the siting of a landfill in their area are trying to block off the entrances to Keratea and a section of Lavrio Avenue.
Calm was restored to the area on Friday, with MAT riot police and local residents holding their positions on either side of Lavrio and the trenches dug in the road on Thursday have been filled in.
According to Keratea's deputy mayor Vassilis Thiveos, neither the municipality nor local residents had any involvement in the attack on the police couple in the early hours of Friday and he stressed that the family had been a part of the local community for many years.
source: ANA
