Two armed men stole 60,000 euros in cash from a driver on Saturday after forcing him to pull over on a road in Aegaleo, western Athens. Police said the driver was transporting the large amount of cash after completing a collection round from service stations on behalf of the company he was working for. The assailants trapped the driver by obstructing his path with a roadside dumpster and then placing a stolen car behind him. They then escaped on a motorcycle parked nearby, police added.

An earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale shook the Peloponnese peninsula of Kyparissia on Saturday but there were no reports of damages or injuries, according to the Athens Geodymanic Institute. The epicentre of the quake, which struck at 6.30 a.m., was located in the sea bed 200 kilometers southwest of Athens.

Police yesterday arrested four suspected members of a sex trafficking ring in Pella prefecture, northern Greece, after a 24-year-old foreign women sought their help, claiming to have been forced into prostitution and raped by her alleged captors. Apart from two foreign men, aged 27, a 22-year-old woman and a 39-year-old Greek, police are also seeking a 40-year-old Greek woman and a 16-year-old foreign youth. The 24-year-old woman told police she was brought to Greece by car, held hostage in a flat and forced to be a sex slave. On Saturday, she alleged, she was forced to sleep with two men for money before being raped by her captors. She subsequently escaped and informed police.

Suspected anarchists hurled petrol bombs at a building housing the Sports Museum near Thessaloniki’s Aristotle University early yesterday, causing minor damage but no injuries, police said. A small group of assailants emerged from the university premises shortly after 3 a.m. and threw the bombs, according to police. They withdrew into the university grounds when officers arrived on the scene, police said.

A 46-year-old man in Greece has died from complications related to the rare brain-debilitating Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) but there is no link to mad cow disease, health officials said on Saturday. The man, a folk singer, died from septic pneumonia in a hospital in the northern town of Veria on Wednesday, a year after being diagnosed with CJD, the health ministry said. But a senior health official insisted the case was a “one in a million” occurrence of sporadic CJD, unrelated to mad cow disease and non-transmissible. (AFP)