In Brief
Garbage strike – Municipal rubbish collectors launch two-day action Municipal rubbish collectors will start a 48-hour countrywide strike today seeking better pay. The municipality of Athens yesterday appealed to residents not to take garbage out into the streets for the strike’s duration. Drugs Lesvos policeman arrested on trafficking charges Police internal affairs officers yesterday arrested an officer on the island of Lesvos, 30-year-old Efstratios Alexopoulos, for dealing in drugs and for supplying two army NCOs serving on the island. Train strike Electric railway affected The Kifissia-Piraeus Athens electric railway will be closed for an hour today from noon to 1 p.m. as staff participate in a work stoppage called by the Piraeus Labor Center. The new metro lines will not be affected. Patras murder. A Preveza farmer was charged yesterday with the murder on Saturday of his estranged wife in front of the their three young children in her house in Patras. Efstathios Kehras, 41, reportedly told police that he killed Maria Christodoulopoulou, 38, because she had started seeing another man after the couple separated six months ago. Schinias. A Council of State rapporteur on the appeal by three environmental groups and the Archaeological Society at Athens against the government decision to build an Olympic watersports complex at Schinias, on part of the 490 BC Marathon battlefield, will argue that the court is not competent to discuss the matter, sources said yesterday. The court is to debate the case on Friday. The rapporteur will argue that Greece is bound by the 1997 Lausanne agreement to build the complex at Schinias. City lights. Athens city councillor Angelos Moschonas yesterday filed a suit against all persons responsible for forgery and dereliction of duty in connection with a tender for a 582-million-drachma streetlighting project. He claims Athens Mayor Dimitris Avramopoulos circumvented the municipal council on the issue. Falsified will. The trial of a former Supreme Court judge charged with forging the will of a distant relative began in Athens yesterday. The former judge, Constantine Androutsopoulos, had been made executor of the original will of the deceased, Dimitris Papafotas, who died in 1994, leaving property worth over 1 billion drachmas. Rape charges. A 20-year-old technical college student was remanded for trial yesterday for the rape of one woman and three attempted rapes in the Athens northern suburbs. Spyros Philippatos was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment a year ago for theft. He confessed to the crimes, saying he had acted under the influence of drugs and had been upset over his parents’ separation. Egnatia. The Arcturus animal welfare group has withdrawn an appeal to the Council of State against the company building the new Egnatia highway across northern Greece, after company officials agreed to take extra measures to protect the habitat of the brown bear. These include the construction of tunnels and bridges. Footballer arrested. A Liberian member of the Olympiakos football team, Zizi Roberts, was arrested yesterday after he allegedly tried to cash a stolen check for 25 million drachmas in Piraeus. Roberts said he had been given the check by his former employers, Panionios Athens. Enterprise. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, which took part in the US-British campaign in Afghanistan, arrived at the US naval support facility at Souda Bay, Crete, yesterday. -Body found. The badly decomposed body of a man wearing a life jacket was found off the island of Naxos yesterday afternoon. Bushed. Two men thrown from a car that tumbled into a gorge near Kavala, northern Greece, were rescued yesterday after spending over 10 hours trapped in bushes. A search party found the two after their families reported them missing. Rescuers had to use chain saws to extricate them from the scrub.
