Traffic police yesterday intensified patrols at key junctions of the national road network – particularly on traditionally dangerous stretches, such as Kakia Skala and the Maliakos Gulf – as tens of thousands of city-dwellers who had abandoned Athens and Thessaloniki for the Dormition of the Virgin public holiday started making their way back home. The traffic police, who described the weekend exodus as one of the biggest of recent years, are to remain on standby until Sunday as many vacationers return from extended holidays.

Police on Saturday sent out urgent appeals to the media following the disappearance of a mentally disabled 14-year-old boy from Athens’s Paidon children’s hospital. Giorgos Savvidis, who suffers from epilepsy, is 1.65 meters tall with brown hair and brown eyes. He was wearing brown shorts and a black top with orange lettering when he disappeared, authorities said. Anyone with information about his whereabouts should telephone 100 or 1056.

Police in Athens were on Saturday seeking the perpetrators behind the manslaughter of a 25-year-old Romanian man whose burnt corpse was found in his Kypseli basement apartment. A postmortem examination of the body revealed a stab wound in the man’s back. Police believe the perpetrator set the apartment alight after stabbing the victim following an argument on Friday night. The motive behind the attack was unclear.

A 26-year-old nightclub doorman on Myconos was detained on drug-dealing charges on Saturday after police on the island received a tip-off from their counterparts in Patras that the man had been one of 27 suspected members of an illegal nightclub protection ring broken up at the central port in 2005. The 26-year-old was arrested, along with his girlfriend, and three other young men after some 150 grams of the hallucinogenic drug ketamine, also known as “Special K” was found in their possession. All five suspects faced a prosecutor on Saturday.

Cyprus President Dimitris Christofias said yesterday that his scheduled meeting with Turkish-Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat on September 3 would be “procedural” but that subsequent talks planned for September 11 were expected to be more “productive.”

A 264-strong Greek peacekeeping contingent in Kosovo was evacuated on Saturday amid fears of contamination by a toxic cloud, military sources in Athens said. The evacuation was ordered on Friday night following reports that a local company was planning to burn toxic substances at a plant about a kilometer from the camp. There had been no reports of any incineration by late yesterday.

Port Authority officials on Samos issued an alert yesterday, saying that the local migrant reception center was flooded with 260 additional immigrants over the weekend. The weekend arrivals boosted the number of migrants at the center to 380.