The authorities found the device and cordoned off the area around the Athens administrative court after calls to the private television station Alter and the daily newspaper Eleftherotypia at about 7:40 a.m. warned that a bomb would go off there in 40 minutes.
“In both cases, the caller said the device had been strapped to a scooter outside the courthouse and gave the scooter’s registration number,” said an officer at the Athens police headquarters who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “The explosion occurred two minutes after the deadline,” the officer said, adding that police bomb disposal experts had gathered the remnants of the device and the scooter and were examining them. A local resident told the private television station Skai that he had seen two men dressed in police uniforms pull up near the court building on a motorcycle about 6:30 a.m. The witness said he greeted the men, who told him they were abandoning the scooter because it had engine problems. According to the witness, the pair then got into a white van parked nearby and were driven away by a third person.
The explosion damaged the facade of the court building as well as several cars, and also blew out windows in nearby apartment buildings.
Justice Minister Haris Kastanidis, who visited the scene, said authorities “will not be intimidated by terrorist attacks.”
“There is no need for verbal condemnation,” he said. “We must simply continue with our job, using the methods we have been using.”
There was no claim of responsibility for the bombing, which comes some two weeks before the scheduled trial of more than a dozen suspected members of a radical Greek anarchist group.
The court targeted on Friday is responsible for civil cases and will not be handling the January 17 trial of suspected members of the Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei group.
GREEK REPORTER
