Greek police said Wednesday they had detained 21 Italian far-rightists and banned gatherings planned in the memory of two members of neo-Nazi group Golden Dawn slain a decade ago.
The Italians were detained late Tuesday at Athens airport and were to be deported, a police source told AFP.
The police also said they were banning any public gatherings linked to the Golden Dawn anniversary, because they constituted a “major risk to public safety” owing to planned anti-fascist counter-gatherings.
Italian neo-fascist party CasaPound in a posting on Telegram said 21 of its members had been “loaded into armoured cars without receiving any explanation” and taken to a police station.
On November 1, 2013, two armed assailants riding a motorbike shot dead the two members of the Golden Dawn party, 22-year-old Manolis Kapelonis and 27-year-old Giorgos Fountoulis, outside the party offices in the Athens suburb of Neo Iraklio.
A third party member was also seriously injured in the drive-by attack.
Golden Dawn, under criticism at the time for beating migrants and political opponents, turned the two men into martyrs.
A few months later, Fountoulis’ father was elected as a Golden Dawn lawmaker in the European Parliament.
The shooting came just weeks after a Golden Dawn member had fatally stabbed anti-fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas, a crime that eventually proved the party’s undoing.
The 2013 attack on the Golden Dawn members was later claimed by a little-known far-left group. No arrests were made and the case remains open.
Once the third-ranked party in parliament at the height of Greece’s debt crisis, Golden Dawn collapsed after its leaders and other senior members were jailed in 2020 over crimes including Fyssas’ murder.
Source: AAP
