In Brief
TOUGH CUSTOMERS
British couple and their children charged with beating shopkeeper A British family of four yesterday faced an Athens prosecutor after allegedly beating the owner of a souvenir store in Plaka late on Saturday night. Store owner Dimitris Karamichalos, 49, was hospitalized with a fracture to his leg. The Athens News Agency named the alleged assailants as Andrew Glover, 44, Vera Johnson-Staermus, 45, and their sons Frederick, 19, and Christian, 24. Karamichalos had reprimanded them for littering his store with pieces of their kebabs and wiping their hands on towels he was selling, to which they reacted violently, police said. BABY DEATH Father faces murder charges A 31-year-old construction worker from Kalamata was charged with murder and will appear before an investigating magistrate today, following the death of his seven-week-old daughter on Friday. The girl was brought to Athens’s Children’s Hospital last Tuesday following a severe beating. The man, identified only as L.V., admitted to hitting the girl as well as swinging her around by her foot to stop her crying while her mother was away. The man’s lawyer told state Net television that his client had hit the child «as any father does,» adding that meningitis, and not the beatings, had killed it. Speedboat death A 50-year-old Czech tourist was yesterday charged with the negligent manslaughter of a 47-year-old Thessaloniki diver whom he allegedly struck with his speedboat off Thasos on Saturday. The unnamed Czech has denied any involvement but residents of the island’s Limanaria district said they saw him driving the boat near the spot where Stavros Sioutis’s body was later recovered. A coroner confirmed Sioutis had died of injuries to his head and back caused by a speedboat propeller. Illegal antiquities A 54-year-old man has been charged with trading in illegal antiquities after police found hundreds of artifacts, dating from the Neolithic era to the Ottoman Empire, in and around his home in Apsalou, Pella,, officers said on Saturday.
