RUSSIAN ROULLETE, GREEK EDITION

On May 5 a gang of hooded perpetrators used firebombs and a canister of petrol to set a bank in downtown Athens alight. In plain view of throngs of demonstrators rallying against the government's merciless budget cuts, the gang, comprising four or five individuals, first smashed the bank's front window with ax and sledgehammer and then tossed the can full of petrol inside. The hooded assassins followed up with several Molotov cocktails. None of the onlookers, although outnumbering the gang 100 to 1, attempted to stop the crime.

Ignition was "explosive" and flashover erupted so fast after the initial combustion that the plume engulfed the old 3-story building, which had no designated fire escape, in under two minutes. The bank was full of employees, who run in terror to save their lives. Three, two women, one of them pregnant with her first child, and one man, did not make it; firefighters and paramedics found them lying in the staircase to the upper floors and near a balcony in the final agonizing contortion of death by asphyxiation.

This deliberate act of murder constitutes the kind of man-killing escalation by Greece's increasingly violent nihilist-anarchist fringe that local politicians and "experts" consistently denied it is a credible possibility. Lulled into apathy and fiction by their own delusions and self-imposed "democratic limits," Greece's "leaders," politicians, "opinion makers," and the "community avant garde" have come to believe in their hearts and minds that the "angry kids," who play with clubs, stones, Molotov cocktails, and petrol cans; and who have been smashing and burning the center of Athens and other Greek cities for years with complete impunity, actually abide by some unwritten pact, or "gentleman's agreement," not to take human life, the steadily increasing material cost be damned. ...............

more see: www.rieas.gr