ATHENS – An 89-year-old gunman arrested for wounding five people in two shootings in Athens on April 28 acted in “protest and despair” against Greek public services, his lawyer said on April 29.
The man opened fire with a shotgun at a branch of Greece’s EFKA social security agency, wounding an employee in the leg, before travelling by taxi to a court building where he fired several more shots, lightly wounding four female court clerks.
He was later arrested in a hotel in the city of Patras, some 200km from Athens.
“It was an act of protest and despair,” his lawyer Vassilis Noulezas told Reuters.
The man’s lawyer said he worked for 40 years as an engineer in Chicago and was previously hospitalised at a psychiatric clinic in Athens. He had applied for a supplementary pension in Greece but his request was rejected, he said.
A public prosecutor on April 29 charged the man with attempted murder and illegal possession of a gun.
Citizen Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis late on April 28 admitted that there were security gaps at some court buildings but that Greece was a safe country overall.
EFKA workers walked out on April 29 to protest over security after the shooting incident, which they said they viewed as another act of “people’s frustration” over understaffed public services. REUTERS
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