New Femicide in Greece: Woman Murdered by Husband in Larissa

Greece was shocked on Tuesday by yet another brutal femicide of a wife by her husband — this time in the city of Larissa in central Greece.

The murder took place on Tuesday morning at 10:30 AM local time in the village of Sotiritsa in Larissa.

According to the local website Onlarissa, a 54-year old man shot his wife multiple times. She was a mother of three. The woman was at her place of work, a restaurant owned by her brother near Larissa, at the time.

Reportedly, the cold-blooded murder took place in front of two other employees of the restaurant.

Her husband has been already arrested, but the motives of the crime are still to be determined.

Seven women murdered by their husbands in seven months in Greece

Seven women have been murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in a period of just seven months, in a series of crimes that continue to shock the country.

These brutal, disturbing crimes, which many argue should be called femicides, as they share common characteristics of violence against women, have highlighted the issue of domestic violence and abuse in the country.

The latest murder before the Larissa crime had taken place in the neighborhood of Dafni in Athens on Friday.

On the afternoon of July 30, a 40-year-old man willingly appeared at a police station in Athens to confess to the murder of his 31-year-old wife.

The police then entered the home, where they found the victim’s body. When asked why he committed the crime, the murderer simply stated that he was jealous.

Many Greek media have been reporting that jealousy was also the main motive of the Larissa crime; however, there is no official statement by the Greek police as of yet.

Despite his attempts to appear like a good family man toward the outside world, friends of the Dafni victim claimed that she had revealed that she was being abused by her husband before the murder.

Murder of Caroline Crouch shocked Greece

The issue of abuse came to the forefront of Greek society when 20-year-old Caroline Crouch was murdered next to her newborn baby by her 33-year-old husband Babis Anagnostopoulos in the Athenian suburb of Glyka Nera.

The murder shocked the public both in Greece and in Britain since the victim was a British national.

Violent crime is relatively rare in Greece, and killings of this type are not common. As time went on, and details emerged, the case became even more disturbing.

Anagnostopoulos, a helicopter pilot, confessed to killing his wife and staging the scene, which included killing the family dog and disabling security cameras, to make it seem as though strangers entered the home and murdered his young wife.

He blamed the crime on foreigners, stating that the intruders were speaking broken Greek and could have been Albanian, an ethnic group that is often the victim of discrimination in Greece.

After two months of professing his innocence and blaming a mysterious group of foreigners, Anagnostopoulos was arrested and confessed to the crime.

Additionally, questions of racism and discrimination emerged in Greece after many felt that Anagnostopoulos’ accusation that the intruders were foreigners was too easily believed.

At this time, feminists and victim’s rights advocates in Greece pushed the public to face this crime as femicide, or the murder of a woman because of her sex. They argued that Crouch’s womanhood enabled her murderer to see her as his possession, a possession he felt he could get rid of when it was convenient for him.

While the murder of the young mother at the hands of her husband was the crime that set off the discussion surrounding murdered women in Greece, it was not the first femicide in the country in the past seven months.

Related: Caroline Crouch Femicide: Collateral Damage, Light Sentencing