In Brief
TRANSPORT…
No public services in Athens between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. today There will be no service on all means of public transport serving the capital – buses, trolleys, urban railway, metro – from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. today due to a strike. Transport employees are demanding a special bonus for working overtime during the August 13-29 Olympics, as is the case with the security forces, and have threatened further action if their demands are not met. AND HOTEL STRIKE Staff demand Olympic bonus, threaten further walkouts next month Striking hotel employees marched through central Athens yesterday to demand salary hikes and the payment of an Olympic bonus. Unionists later discussed further strike action and did not rule out the possibility of walkouts next month when the Olympic Games will be under way. Talks between workers and the Association of Attica Hotel Owners earlier this month ended in a deadlock. CORPSE DISCOVERED Missing girl, 15, found in a ditch A 15-year-old girl who sneaked away from her home in the village of Vlasti near the northern town of Kozani on Sunday so that she could celebrate Greece’s Euro 2004 soccer victory was found dead in a ditch yesterday, police said. Triandafyllia Antoniadou had suffered severe head injuries, suggesting that she had either been hit by a car or murdered, according to the coroner who examined her. The body had been moved to the ditch from somewhere else, the coroner said. Olympic security Public Order Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis is due in Berlin today for an official two-day visit during which he is to discuss Olympic security plans with German Interior Minister Otto Schilly. Voulgarakis is to be accompanied by top-level security officials, including Police Chief Fotis Nasiakos and National Intelligence Service Chief Pavlos Apostolidis. Talks will also touch on police cooperation for the World Soccer Championship in Germany in 2006. Athlete protection South Korea said yesterday that it would ask Greece to upgrade security measures for its athletes during the Olympics, Agence France-Presse reported. «The government plans to ask the Greek government to upgrade its anti-terrorism alert for South Korean athletes from the current ‘medium’ to ‘high’ where US and British teams are categorized,» AFP cited Song Kyong-Won, a prime ministerial office spokesman, as saying. Fears of terrorism have grown in South Korea after Muslim militants beheaded a South Korean in Iraq last month. Cigarette raid A group of six armed robbers made off with between 200,000 and 250,000 euros’ worth of cigarettes following a raid on a long-distance haulage firm in the Athens suburb of Aegaleo on Tuesday night, police said yesterday. The guard on duty at the time, a 39-year-old Iraqi, said that the five men and one woman fled in a white truck into which they had loaded eight or nine crates of cigarettes. Fatal crash A young man was burnt to death and three others seriously injured after their car crashed into a ditch on the road between Lavrion and Keratea at around 3 a.m. yesterday. The driver of a truck who spotted the burning vehicle managed to extract the driver and two passengers but not the fourth youth. The three survivors, aged between 18 and 22, were yesterday being treated in hospital. The youth who died had been around the same age. Their identities were not revealed. Bootleg DVDs Two Greeks yesterday faced a prosecutor for allegedly selling pirate DVDs over the Internet after an audiovisual production firm took legal action. The two men were arrested after officers confiscated hundreds of DVDs, computer equipment, seven bank deposit booklets, six credit cards and several adhesive DVD covers for various movies. Sex attack A 19-year-old soldier from Kozani and a 36-year-old man from Didymoteicho were yesterday questioned in connection with an alleged sex attack on a 16-year-old youth last Friday, police said. The soldier, identified only as S.C., admitted to molesting the boy, but the second man, identified as A.E., denied any involvement. Both were released pending charges.
