Injured officer thought he was going to die

The police officer who was attacked by a group of people during protests in Nea Smyrni on March 9 gave a deposition describing the events of that night to a prosecutor on Tuesday. 

The police officer, whose injury was shown in a photo widely spread in Greek media, told of how he was thrown off his motorcycle and attacked by a crowd and having parts of his equipment, including ammunition magazines, stolen.

“I felt a flurry of blows from the crowd that attacked me, as they aimed for my head shouting ‘kill him’,” he said. He stressed that his priority at the time was keeping his service weapon from the crowd as he feared what could have happened if they had stolen it, but he mentioned that other parts of his equipment were looted.

“As that large group of people were hitting me in the head to kill me, if somebody grabbed my gun, they would not hesitate to shoot me. I felt that was it, that my end was near, and the crowd would not stop hitting me until I was dead,” he recounted to the prosecutor. 

According to the police officer, the attack lasted approximately two minutes but considers it a miracle that he was able to survive.

The attack occurred during a protest held in the aftermath of a video shared the day before in which a group of police officers can been seen attacking an individual in the square of Nea Smyrni.