Golden Dawn trial interrupted amid tension in courtroom
Judges hearing an ongoing case against the far-right Golden Dawn party, accused of constituting a criminal organization, had to leave the courtroom on Tuesday after tension broke out between the plaintiffs’ and defendants’ sides.
Tuesday’s hearing related to an attack by suspected Golden Dawn members on a branch of Antipnoia in June 2008, in which two members of the anarchist group were stabbed.
Tension arose after witnesses for Antipnoia requested that supporters gathered outside the specially designed courtroom in Athens’s Korydallos Prison be allowed entry. They objected when police refused the request, saying that dozens of supporters of Golden Dawn had already been let into the courtroom.
The incident sparked a heated exchange of words between the two sides, with police stepping in when they started to launch water bottles and other projectiles at each other.
The judges walked out of the courtroom after adjourning the hearing until Thursday.
The trial against Golden Dawn comprises hearings on a number of separate incidents, chiefly the murder in September 2013 of rapper Pavlos Fyssas by a self-proclaimed member of the neo-Nazi party who has confessed to the crime.
