A fatal bomb blast at the offices of the Citizens’ Protection
Ministry in the capital at the end of last month was probably organized
by jailed members of the domestic terrorist group Revolutionary
Struggle, police sources told Kathimerini over the weekend.
The letter bomb that detonated next to the office of Minister Michalis
Chrysochoidis on the evening of June 24, killing the minister’s
52-year-old aide, Giorgos Vassilakis, is believed to have been designed
by an explosives expert recruited by peripheral members of Revolutionary
Struggle.
A source at the ministry told Kathimerini that the
force’s counterterrorism unit had a “clear picture” of the assailants
behind the attack on the ministry. “The case is at a critical point
right now – we’ve spread a wide net in our search for suspects and we
expect to start reeling them in soon,” he said. The source said police
were honing in on “two or three people” believed to have been involved
in executing the hit. As for the aim of the blast, police said they did
not believe it had been intended to be fatal but rather to scare
Chrysochoidis into resigning his post. In his nine months on the job,
Chrysochoidis has overseen an operation that led to the arrest of six
suspected members of Revolutionary Struggle, one of the most active
domestic terrorist groups in recent years; he also launched a police
probe into the connections between domestic terrorist groups and
anti-establishment organizations, leading to the arrest of several
suspected members of Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, a smaller
guerrilla group. In a previous stint as public order minister in 2002,
Chrysochoidis led police in disbanding the deadly terrorist group
November 17.