NEWS

In Brief

Landfill strike

As trash cleanup continues, new action signals more woes As municipal employees yesterday continued gathering thousands of tons of trash from the streets of the capital, workers at Attica’s main landfill walked off the job, demanding permanent status for some 200 colleagues on short-term contracts. A spokesman for the landfill workers’ union, Giorgos Hardas, said that these employees have special training in how to operate the waste-processing plant adjacent to the landfill and that their likely redundancy would hamper the smooth operation of the plant. Of some 10,000 tons of trash that accumulated on the streets of the capital over a three-week municipal workers’ strike, an estimated two-thirds of it had been picked up by yesterday. Murder probe Man, 66, was tied and gagged Police in Athens yesterday were investigating the circumstances surrounding the death a 66-year-old Greek-American whose corpse was found bound and gagged in his 6th-floor apartment in the district of Neos Cosmos in the early hours of the morning. The unnamed victim had been struck several times on the head but had died of asphyxiation from the gag, according to a coroner. Police said they believed the intruders’ motive had been burglary, as there were signs that the apartment had been rifled. Racist attack Masked vandals early yesterday broke into a building in the Cretan port of Hania that accommodates a center for immigrants, set fire to furniture and painted swastika symbols on the interior and exterior walls, according to witnesses. The fire set by the vandals was small and fizzled out before firemen arrived at the scene, according to police, who were given descriptions of the perpetrators but had not traced them by late last night. There had been no one at the center at the time of the attack and so no injuries were reported. Carjacking A 33-year-old motorist contacted police late on Tuesday night to report two muggers who forced her to stop her vehicle in the Athens suburb of Palaio Faliro before getting in and relieving her of her wallet, jewelry and cell phone. According to the woman’s account of events, the assailants forced her to drive onto the Athens-Lamia national highway before abandoning her at the 33rd kilometer. She stopped a passing motorist who called police to the scene. Bank heists Police in Attica reported two armed raids on banks yesterday, neither of which led to any injuries. In the first robbery, two men targeted a branch of ATEbank in the southern suburb of Alimos and in the second a pair of gunmen raided a branch of the same bank in the central Athens district of Pangrati. It was unclear how much was netted in the raids.

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