Attackers Open Fire on Israeli Embassy in Athens

By NIKI KITSANTONISDEC. 12, 2014

ATHENS — The Greek authorities said on Friday that an early-morning gun attack on the Israeli Embassy used the same weapons as and closely resembled a similar attack on the residence of the German ambassador a year ago.

Neither attack caused any casualties or serious damage.

Witnesses told the police that four assailants had arrived on motorcycles around 3 a.m. and that two had raked the embassy building with Kalashnikov fire. A police spokesman said the authorities would await a review of footage from the embassy’s surveillance camera to corroborate those accounts.

According to a police statement, ballistics tests on 54 bullet casings found in front of the embassy building, in the capital’s affluent northern suburbs, showed that the shots were fired from two Kalashnikov rifles used in a similar attack in December 2013 on the German ambassador’s home, also in northern Athens.

Responsibility for that attack was claimed by an organization called the Group of Popular Rebels, which also said it had carried out a shooting at the offices of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy party in January last year.

“The modus operandi is 99 percent the same as the attack in December last year,” the police official said of the shooting on Friday, noting that a claim of responsibility could come “within hours.”

He said the attack might be claimed by the same group or by members of the same group under a different name.

The Greek public order minister, Vassilis Kikilias, who visited the scene of the attack, insisted that Greece “is still a safe country.” “No one is going to affect relations between Greece and Israel,” he added. A government spokeswoman, Sofia Voultepsi, said, “Every terrorist attack strikes at the heart of democracy, at the heart of the country itself.”

The attack on Friday came amid mounting political and financial turmoil in Greece. The debt-racked country will probably face early elections next year, and there has been fear about the resurgence of guerrilla groups. On Wednesday, the police destroyed a bomb planted outside a bank, also in northern Athens, after receiving a warning by telephone.

The motive for the attack on the Israeli Embassy was unclear, although Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza have been condemned in protests in Greece.