Security breach at Thessaloniki courthouse was ‘quite serious,’ minister says
The gap in the security of the courthouse in Thessaloniki where a parcel bomb sent to a senior judge was found and defused on Monday was “quite serious,” Justice Minister Giorgos Floridis said on Tuesday.
“For such a device to reach the office of the president of the Appeals Court judges and from there to the office of another president shows that something is obviously not working well in the checks,” he told Open TV channel. “There is a gate that does not have an x-ray machine, but that does not mean that everything that passes through there should not go through the [other] machine.”
The minister said police is reassessing the entire security system of the courthouse, which suffered a major bomb attack a few years ago.
The Supreme Court and the court’s prosecutor’s office issued a joint statement calling on the ministry to install mail and parcel scanners in every court of the country to detect potentially dangerous objects and “ensure the safety and unhindered access” of citizens and judicial officials.
“We express our deep regret, but also our strong concern on the targeting, once again, of judicial officials who carry out the work of implementing the laws,” the statement, signed by the Court’s spokesperson, Judge Panagiotis Lymberopoulos, and the deputy prosecutor of the Supreme Court Konstantinos Tzavelas, said.
The targeted judge in the country’s second-largest city of Thessaloniki found the package suspicious and didn’t open it, calling court police who evacuated the building.
Few members of the public were in the courthouse at the time, as most trials have been postponed due to a lawyers’ strike.
A scan revealed an explosive device, which army bomb experts defused.
