Municipality issues statement following firebomb migrant attack
The municipal authority of Aghious Anargyrous in northwestern Athens on Sunday issued a statement calling on citizens not to tolerate racism and on police to take action, following two separate attacks against migrants in one day, which left one man suffering from serious burns.
Pakistani national Naveed Navas was being treated for serious injuries to his hands and back after unknown assailants threw a homemade petrol bomb into the courtyard of his house late last week, according to a report in Sunday’s Ethnos newspaper. Navas told the paper that he was sleeping in the courtyard when a Molotov cocktail exploded beside him, setting his mattress alight. His housemate, also a Pakistani national, was not injured in the attack.
Witnesses, Ethnos reported, said they had seen three heavyset white men watching the house in which the two Pakistanis lived after the attack and running off when the police arrived.
The attack is believed to be an escalation of similar assaults that have taken place against dark-skinned migrants by groups of ultranationalists on the street, in their place of work and in their homes, all around Greece in the past few months.
«I have lived in Greece for around 18 years and have never had any problems,» Navas told Ethnos. «I am in the country legally, I vote and I work as a painter.»
Meanwhile, the same report said that on the same night as the assault against Navas, a group of men armed with bats and chains attacked another house in which migrants live in the same area. No injuries were reported in this assault.
In response to the attacks, the Municipal Council of Aghious Anargyrous – Kamatero issued a statement «calling on citizens to show no tolerance for such murderous attacks and to forbid a climate of bigotry and racism from taking root in our municipality.»
The local authority also called on the police to «take all necessary measures to prevent such phenomena and to arrest the people responsible» for the attacks.
