ATHENS, Greece – A previously unknown terrorist group has sent a statement to a Greek newspaper claiming responsibility for the 2004 bombing of a courthouse in central Greece and two failed bombings in Athens, the newspaper said Thursday.
Police said all three bombs had been set up to detonate with the use of a mobile phone – a tactic not used before in Greece.
The group, which calls itself Popular Will, sent a seven-page statement on a CD-ROM to the Eleftherotypia newspaper on Wednesday, the paper said.
The statement claimed responsibility for the May 2004 courthouse bombing in the town of Larissa, two months before Athens was to host the Olympic Games. The court was empty, but a passer-by was slightly injured.
The group said it had acted when it knew the courthouse was empty, to minimize casualties, and that it had carried out the attack because authorities had been planning to move arrested members of the November 17 terrorist group to a prison in Larissa, the newspaper said.
November 17 was Greece's deadliest terrorist organization. It killed 23 people, including U.S., British and Turkish nationals, between 1975 and 2002, when a botched bombing led police to capture several members.
In its statement, the Popular Will group also claimed it was behind a failed bombing in June 2007 at an Athens building housing offices of German pharmaceutical company Bayer and electronics company Siemens, and an attempted bombing Monday against the Economic and Social Committee of Greece, a policy research institute affiliated with the European Union, the newspaper said.
No comments:
Post a Comment