In Brief
ISAP CLOSURE
No electric railway from Attiki to Faliro until next Monday Only the northern half of the Kifissia-Piraeus electric railway (ISAP) will be in operation for the next week after the section between Attiki in central Athens and Faliro in southern Athens was shut down on Saturday as part of a long-term refurbishment program. The section between Attiki and Monastiraki had already been closed but ISAP decided that the whole of the southern part of the line has to be out of action until Monday, August 9. A replacement bus service (X19) will be in operation. The Attiki-Monastiraki section will remain closed until the end of the year. SAMOS FIRE Questioning for three suspects Three men arrested on Samos over the weekend are due to face a prosecutor today in connection to claims that they were responsible for starting a wildfire that burned for three days last week on the northeastern Aegean island. Sources said that one of the suspects, a local livestock breeder, has already admitted to his part in the blaze, which destroyed shrubland and hundreds of trees but no property. Peach protest Peach producers in Pella, northern Greece, are planning to block the entrances to canning factories today to express their disappointment at the prices they are being offered for their produce. Representatives of the protesting farmers said that about 1,000 people will take part in the demonstrations and that the farmers will use their tractors to block access to the factories. Attica blaze The prosecutor investigating last month’s wildfire northeast of Athens has asked the fire service to interview any Public Power Corporation (PPC) employees that were responsible for the maintenance of a substation near Kapandriti, where the blaze is believed to have started. It emerged yesterday that the fire service submitted its initial report on the fire to the prosecutor but officers have now been asked to obtain more information about the substation and its maintenance. Policeman arrested A police officer is among four people who have been arrested on suspicion of trying to sell large amounts of cannabis smuggled into Greece from Albania. In a statement released on Saturday, the police said that they had been tracking the allegedly rogue policeman for four months. He was not named. Of the other three suspects, two are Albanian and one Greek. Pilots buried Two army pilots who were killed when their Apache attack helicopter went down last Friday in Megara, west of Athens, were buried yesterday. Pilot Andreas Dermaris, aged 37, was buried in his hometown of Lamia in central Greece. The funeral was attended by his wife, who is nine months’ pregnant with the couple’s fourth child. Co-pilot Constantinos Giokas, whose age was not made public, was buried in Piraeus. Bomb scare The 884 Athens-Kalambaka train was temporarily held up on Saturday morning after Hellenic Railways Organization officials received an anonymous bomb threat. Officers scoured the train looking for evidence of an explosive device before concluding that the call must have been a prank.
