In Brief
Warship outrage
Official dismissed for allowing party on floating museum The National Defense General Staff yesterday ordered the dismissal of a senior navy official responsible for the Georgios Averof, a decommissioned battleship operating as a museum, after it emerged that a shipping firm had used it as a venue for an evening function. Commodore Evangelos Gavalas, who had overseen the battleship since 2008, was told to step down after defense officials deemed the decision to allow the battleship’s premises to be used for a party «a major error.» Kidnapping probe Moroccan reports sexual abuse Police in Thessaloniki said yesterday that they were seeking seven Moroccan nationals alleged to have abducted a 24-year-old compatriot from an Athens cafe on May 22 before taking him to an apartment in Thessaloniki and demanding a 3,000-euro ransom from his relatives in Morocco. The 24-year-old contacted police after managing to escape from the apartment in Thessaloniki’s Evosmos district. He told police that his compatriots beat him and sexually molested him with a wooden stick. Tax office raids Police in Athens yesterday were seeking the perpetrators behind two burglaries that took place at two different tax offices over the weekend, one in Kallithea, southern Athens, and one in the northern suburb of Nea Ionia. Staff at the two tax offices reported the raids early yesterday after discovering that the safes had been cracked open. The Nea Ionia offices are believed to have suffered the greatest losses as the burglars made off with a stack of VAT returns that tax office staff had intended to deposit today. Road fatalities Traffic police reported two road fatalities yesterday, one near Sparta and the other near Tripoli, both in the Peloponnese. The first occurred in the early hours yesterday and led to the death of a 19-year-old woman, when the car she had been driving veered off the Kalamata-Sparta national road and into a wall. A few hours later, an 83-year-old man was killed when the scooter he had been riding collided with a car outside Tripoli. On Sunday, a 97-year-old pedestrian was killed in Sparta after being hit by a car. Teachers’ wages The Education Ministry yesterday reassured the Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OLME) that there will be no delay in the payment of teachers marking the papers of students currently sitting university entrance examinations. In a written statement, the ministry said the teachers would be paid in full and not in installments, but did not determine what the level of their remuneration would be. OLME, which said last week that its members would strike over plans to cut their salaries, is expected to issue a response to the ministry’s announcement today. Thwarted robbers A gang of would-be robbers stormed into a supermarket in Thessaloniki yesterday afternoon, piled up trolleys with food and charged past the cash registers without paying but were stopped by police officers who happened to be on a foot patrol outside the store. The perpetrators sought refuge on the nearby grounds of the Aristotle University, police said. It is thought that the youths had wanted to distribute the stolen goods to pedestrians outside the store.
