Knife Attack: Corfu Student Stabs Two Schoolmates

Corfu’s Saroko Square saw a fight between students at noon on Wednesday with one of those involved attacking the others and injuring them with a knife as well as wounding a passer-by who attempted to stop him.

Knife incident in Corfu

Presently, the cause of the altercation is unknown, but the assailant is reportedly a high school student known by a nickname, who began a fight with another high school student, drew a knife, and stabbed the victim in the ribs.

A third student who attempted to intervene was stabbed in the leg but was kept from any severe consequences by a bystander, who strapped the wound up with the belt of his trousers, slowing the bleeding until an ambulance arrived.

The attacker was allegedly in a crazed state, threatening to stab anyone who approached him, as he did with a 50-year-old man who attempted to stop him – the man was cut on the arm.

The people wounded by the knife were taken by ambulance to the Corfu hospital, while the attacker apparently disappeared as the police were allegedly slow in arriving because the Immediate Action Center did not respond to the calls of the eyewitnesses. However, it has now been reported that the perpetrator has been arrested.

The violent incident took place during rush hour in the center of Corfu, at noon, a time when many children are waiting for the urban KTEL bus to take them home after school. Ambulance personnel told local media that they have often been called to take injured minors to hospital in recent times, but that this was the first time that a knife had been used in Corfu.

Violent Crime in Greece

Violent crime surged in Greece in the post-lockdown period in 2021. In July of that year two boys, aged 15 and 13, armed with a knife, robbed a 16-year-old in a tram train in the southern suburbs of Athens.

In the same week, a 54-year-old man, a fugitive from a psychiatric hospital, attacked and stabbed four passersby in Zografou. After the unprecedented attack on strangers in the street, the man ransacked his home and called the police. “Come on, I have stabbed people, I will commit suicide,” the perpetrator said when he called the police.

A study titled “Understanding Knife Crime in Greece: The Narratives of University Students,” which came out of the 24th annual CiCea International Conference 2023 in Madrid, Spain, attempted to explain the emergence of a social phenomenon of students carrying and sometimes using knives.

The study reads, “As the phenomenon is reported to rise, socioeconomic conditions are conducive to developing related offending behavior. Poverty, stress, lack of trust in the educational process, and the risk of deviance caused by weakness are distinctive aspects.”

The study adds, “The continuation of the crisis in Greece and its socioeconomic consequences has revealed pre-existing social protection problems and the welfare state’s weaknesses, the most important of which are those of the school.”