fonte greca di regime, 26.06.10
Bombers fooled security staff of marked minister
Device was brought from political office
A damaged window is seen on the seventh floor of the Citizens’ Protection
Ministry yesterday. Police were examining fragments of the bomb that
detonated there on Thursday, killing an official, for leads to the perpetrators.
A parcel bomb that detonated on Thursday night next to the office of Citizens’ Protection Minister
Michalis Chrysochoidis, killing the minister’s 52-year-old aide,
had not been sent directly to the ministry building but mailed to
Chrysochoidis’s political office and transferred from there to the
ministry two days later, police sources told Kathimerini yesterday.
According to the same sources, the
package had been marked with a name and address, ostensibly of the
sender. But the signature, “Christos Karavelas, Ekali,”
appears to have been a stab at dark humor by the terrorists as
Karavelas is a former Siemens Hellas executive who has been
implicated in the cash-for-contracts scandal embroiling the
electronics and engineering firm and who continues to elude arrest.
Sources told Kathimerini that the
package sat in Chrysochoidis’s political office for two days before
its transfer on Thursday to the ministry building in Katehaki, east
of the city center, one of the best-guarded addresses in Greece.
Ironically, it was probably close aides of the minister or even
members of his security detail who brought the package into the
ministry building.
There the package was opened by Giorgos
Vassilakis, who sorted all the minister’s mail. The bomb, which had
been wrapped up and resembled a gift, exploded in Vassilakis’s
hands, killing him instantly.
According to police, the device
consisted of half a kilogram of gunpowder and ammonium nitrate and
had been packed into a cardboard box.
Counterterrorism officers yesterday
were seeking to determine how the bomb made its way past an
airport-style X-ray machine at the main entrance to the ministry
building and all the way up to the seventh floor where the adjacent
offices of Chrysochoidis and Vassilakis are located.
Police officials admitted yesterday
that the X-ray machine does not contain a bomb detector so it is
possible that security staff at the ministry saw the package pass
through machine without realizing what it was.
In Parliament yesterday all the party
leaders condemned the attack. Prime Minister George Papandreou said
Greek society would not be terrorized.
“The murderers should know that they
will fail because they have the entire state and society against
them,” he said.