Violence erupts at Greek demos

Riot police clash with demonstrators in Athens yesterday during a 24-hour general strike to protest the government’s austerity plan to solve the country’s debt crisis

Violence erupted on the sidelines of a Greek protest against government austerity measures yesterday, with riot police firing tear gas at hooded youths hurling firebombs and vandalising stores.
Clashes erupted at the start of a union protest and outside the nation’s parliament as Greece was gripped by a second general strike in two weeks.
A few dozen hooded youths infiltrated a union protest near the Athens Polytechnic university and threw a firebomb and stones at police, who responded by firing tear gas.
The youths torched a car and set fire to garbage bins before fleeing.
Soon afterwards more youths broke out of a 300-strong anarchist bloc and attacked police outside parliament, vandalising a dozen stores in the surrounding area, police said.
In the northern city of Thessaloniki, protesters threw eggs and yoghurt cartons pilfered from a supermarket at a government building, police said.
Two separate protests in Thessaloniki drew around 5,000 participants apiece, they said.
In Athens several thousand demonstrators had earlier marched on the Greek parliament.
Around 50 police officers in uniform and some 200 firemen joined the protest to voice their opposition to state employee pay cuts.
An earlier demonstration by Communist workers that also drew several thousand participants ran its course without incident.
Clashes between youths and police frequently break out near the Polytechnic, the site of an uprising by students in 1973 that was brutally repressed by the military junta then ruling the country.