Ministry hit was plotted from jail
A fatal bomb blast at the offices of the Citizens’ Protection Ministry in the capital at the end of last month was probably organized by jailed members of the domestic terrorist group Revolutionary Struggle, police sources told Kathimerini over the weekend. The letter bomb that detonated next to the office of Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis on the evening of June 24, killing the minister’s 52-year-old aide, Giorgos Vassilakis, is believed to have been designed by an explosives expert recruited by peripheral members of Revolutionary Struggle. A source at the ministry told Kathimerini that the force’s counterterrorism unit had a «clear picture» of the assailants behind the attack on the ministry. «The case is at a critical point right now – we’ve spread a wide net in our search for suspects and we expect to start reeling them in soon,» he said. The source said police were honing in on «two or three people» believed to have been involved in executing the hit. As for the aim of the blast, police said they did not believe it had been intended to be fatal but rather to scare Chrysochoidis into resigning his post. In his nine months on the job, Chrysochoidis has overseen an operation that led to the arrest of six suspected members of Revolutionary Struggle, one of the most active domestic terrorist groups in recent years; he also launched a police probe into the connections between domestic terrorist groups and anti-establishment organizations, leading to the arrest of several suspected members of Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire, a smaller guerrilla group. In a previous stint as public order minister in 2002, Chrysochoidis led police in disbanding the deadly terrorist group November 17.
