In Brief
Egnatia tolls
Motorists to pay for use of new highway as of July Tollgates will be set up on the Egnatia Highway in northern Greece over the next couple of months, Infrastructure, Transport and Networks Minister Dimitris Reppas said yesterday, adding that all tollgates will be operating electronically by the year 2013. On the Egnatia Highway, the first tollgates will open at the Malgara junction in July and the second plaza will open at Polymylos a month later. The charge will be 2.80 euros. Attacks claimed Conspiracy hit court and jail The Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire yesterday claimed responsibility for two bombs that targeted Attica’s Korydallos Prison and Thessaloniki’s main court complex within 24 hours of each other last week. Police had suspected the urban guerrilla group’s involvement in both hits, which caused two minor injuries. In a proclamation on the Internet, the group said it had chosen its latest targets to protest the «bolstering of conservative institutions.» Double killing A 55-year-old tax office employee and his 30-year-old Bulgarian girlfriend, whose bodies were found bound in a holiday home in the village of Koxari, near the Cretan port of Iraklio, are believed to have been killed by professionals, police said yesterday. The victims had been shot several times at close range, according to police. Armed commuter Police in northern Athens yesterday were seeking an immigrant who caused panic on a bus he had been traveling on when a gun he had been carrying went off. According to the bus driver, who called the police, the shot pierced the seat the man had been sitting in but caused no injuries. The migrant got off the bus and fled. Police found a 9-millimeter shell in the bus which had been running the B9 route linking Halkokondyli and Nea Kifissia. Bomb hoax A passenger ferry set sail for Piraeus from Patmos yesterday morning with several hours delay following an anonymous warning of a bomb on the vessel, which however turned out to be a hoax. The Blue Star II had been approaching the Aegean island late on Tuesday, with 664 passengers aboard, when the phone call was made to the Ethnos newspaper. The vessel docked, as planned, at Patmos where police searched the ferry but found no suspect device. The ferry later completed its scheduled return to Piraeus. Car corpse Police yesterday were investigating the circumstances surrounding the death of a 34-year-old Albanian man who was found dead in his car in Karditsa, central Greece. The corpse bore various wounds, according to police who said a coroner would establish the cause of death. The victim’s car was found on a pedestrianized street near the city center. Freighter located A Greek-owned freighter seized by pirates in the Gulf of Aden last week has anchored off the coast of Somalia, the European naval force in the region said yesterday. The 72,000-ton bulk carrier, with a crew of Filipinos, was hijacked off the coast of Oman on May 12 while en route to India.
