Robbers shoot dead street kiosk owner
Unidentified robbers wielding a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a pistol shot dead a 45-year-old street kiosk owner in Ano Liosia, northwestern Athens, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, police said.
According to witnesses, two men approached the kiosk at around 1.30 a.m. The kiosk owner, an ethnic Greek from the former Soviet Union, resisted the robbers’ demands for cash and fired at them with his own pistol, the witnesses said. The assailants fired back several times before fleeing in a blue car.
The vehicle was discovered later a few blocks away from the scene of the shooting by police who ran a search on it and found that it had been reported stolen.
Nine shells from the Kalashnikov and three bullet casings found at the scene were being examined by police forensic experts for links to the perpetrators.
Police said they were treating the shooting as a botched robbery rather than a contract killing as money was found missing from the kiosk.
