Greek police: 4 suspected terrorists arrested

ATHENS, Greece — Greek police arrested four people Thursday on suspicion of involvement in a militant group that detonated a bomb outside the home of a prominent opposition lawmaker the previous day.

Greece has a long history of domestic far-left terrorist violence, with attacks mainly limited to the capital and occasionally the northern city of Thessaloniki. Although several groups are active, most limit themselves to small bombings that rarely cause injury and are preceded by warning calls. Arrests are very rare.

The suspects — three men and one woman — will appear before a prosecutor later Thursday, police spokesman Panagiotis Stathis said.

The suspects were believed to be linked to the far-left group Conspiracy Nuclei of Fire, which first appeared last year and carried out a string of firebombings before escalating to planting small time bombs in May.

They were among five people detained Wednesday during raids on two apartments in different parts of Athens shortly after a small time bomb exploded outside the central Athens apartment of the Socialist Party’s representative for the economy, Louka Katseli.

“For all those arrested, there is evidence of participation in a criminal organization with the intention of committing felonies,“ Stathis said during a news conference.

Wednesday’s bomb, which consisted of explosives placed inside a pressure cooker, caused minor damage and no injuries. The blast was preceded by two anonymous warning calls to a Greek newspaper and a television station, and police evacuated the area.

National elections will be held Oct. 4 and the Socialists are expected to win.

Stathis said police had recovered another pressure cooker time bomb “of identical construction” from one of the apartments raided Wednesday, along with bomb-making material, explosives and computers.

Although there was no claim of responsibility for Wednesday’s attack, the Conspiracy Nuclei of Fire group has claimed pressure cooker bombs in the past. In July, such a device exploded at the Athens home of Panayiotis Chinofotis, a former minister in charge of police, while earlier this month another detonated outside the Macedonia-Thrace Ministry building in the northern city of Thessaloniki. Neither caused any injuries.

Attacks in Greece by far-left militants and anarchist groups have increased sharply since widespread riots in December, sparked by the fatal police shooting of a teenager in Athens.

On June 17, militants shot dead a policeman guarding a terror trial witness in central Athens. A little-known group calling itself Sect of Revolutionaries claimed the attack.

Authorities had believed that years of far-left terrorist violence had come to an end after the arrest of several members of the country’s deadliest group, November 17, following a botched bombing in 2002.

But in 2007, a group called Revolutionary Struggle fired a small anti-tank rocket at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, causing minor damage and no injuries.

That group has also stepped up its activity since the December riots, severely wounding a riot policeman in a January shooting and planting a powerful bomb outside the Athens Stock Exchange on Sept. 2, causing extensive damage but no injuries.

It also claimed responsibility for planting a car bomb, which failed to detonate, outside Citibank’s offices in a northern Athens suburb in February. At the time authorities had said that had the bomb exploded, it could have crumbled the four-story building.