Scores of young people who took to the streets of Athens to mark the tenth anniversary of the murder of teen Alexandros Grigoropoulos clashed with police in streets around central Athens on Thursday evening.
The new confrontations took place around Exarcheia, an area known to be the primary neighborhood of Athenian anarchists.
Young men with their faces covered smashed sidewalk concrete, threw rocks and placed barricades around several streets in the area, including Tositsa, Metaxa, Stournari and Themistocleous streets.
Others vandalized the entrance of the Ministry of Culture by breaking its doors, before heading to the rooftop of the Ministry building, where they then threw rocks down on the police.
The Athens police had ordered the closure of Syntagma and Panepistimio metro stations from Thursday morning as a precautionary measure against possible violence. The two stations opened again after noon but Panepistimio Station was forced to shut down again, due to the new clashes.
The unrest took place only a few hours after the first outbreak of riots on Thursday morning.
Clashes broke out in Thessaloniki as well, where people threw Molotov cocktails at the police following the end of the march in the memory of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old boy who was killed by a police officer in central Athens ten years ago.
A construction site in Thessaloniki’s new metro system was set in fire following the clashes on Egnatia street. Firefighters rushed to the site to put out the fires.
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