ATHENS: Police and students clashed outside the Greek parliament on Tuesday despite an appeal for calm by the president for the funeral of the 15-year-old boy whose killing by police set off nationwide riots.
Protesters threw Molotov cocktails and other missiles at police guarding parliament as the worst civil unrest to hit Greece in decades entered a fourth day.
Authorities closed off Athens streets after a third night of rampaging looting of banks and stores. Police, who made 87 arrests, said some youths staged attacks with swords and slingshots stolen from a weapons shop.
Twelve more police were injured in Monday’s clashes and at least 10 people were hospitalised with problems caused by clouds of tear gas that blanketed central Athens. The unrest quickly flared again on Tuesday despite a government vow to clamp down on the protests.
Tear gas battles erupted at the Athens Polytechnic which along with the nearby Athens Law School has been occupied by students protesting at the killing. Both colleges are in the Exarchia district where 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos was fatally shot by police on Saturday.
Thousands of teachers and students, followed a large banner declaring “Assassins, the government is the culprit”, took part in the march on parliament.
Burnt out rubbish bins, glass and paving slabs torn off sidewalks littered the streets from the Monday’s troubles when emergency services said fires were put out at 49 office buildings, 47 shops, 14 banks, 20 cars and three ministries.
The northern city of Salonika also saw major clashes. At least 70 stores and seven banks were set ablaze, according to the ANA news agency. Several thousand students staged a protest march there on Tuesday.
The funeral of Grigoropoulos was to be held at the southern Athens suburb of Palio Faliro at 1300 GMT. He was allegedly among a group of youths that had thrown stones at a squad car in a district of Athens that is known as a radical stronghold. The policeman who fired the shots and his partner have been arrested.
Universities and schools have been closed, students planned their own protest rally on Tuesday and unions have said that a general strike, which was called before the killing, will go ahead.
The mass unrest has piled pressure on the conservative prime minister Costas Karamanlis who vowed to end the troubles. Karamanlis called a crisis cabinet meeting on Monday night and held new meetings with President Karolos Papoulias and leaders of allied and opposition political parties on Tuesday.
“We will tolerate no leniency in the attribution of responsibility,” the prime minister said after talks with the president. The president appealed for calm, calling on Greeks to “honour Alexis’ memory peacefully.” But the government, already in trouble over the state of the economy and a series of political scandals, has been strongly criticised over the havoc.
“The whole country was delivered to chaos by an irresponsible government,” the Eleftherotypia daily said in an editorial on Tuesday. The top-selling Ta Nea added: “The police were absent from nearly all locations where vandalism occurred.” The violence has showcased the organisational capacity of urban radicals and the failure of the government to crack down on them, critics said.
Criminologist Ioannis Panoussis said, “There is a well-functioning mechanism in place,” with the Internet and cellphones speeding up the troublemakers’ capacity to react, Panoussis said. “Because this time it connected with the anger of the youths, the scale of the incidents vastly expanded,” he added.
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