President condemns call to violence against academic

President Prokopis Pavlopoulos has condemned a campaign inciting violence against a professor at Athens’s Panteion University after dozens of posters were pasted on walls and electrical poles in different parts of the city, showing a photograph of the academic and titled “This is the fascist.”

Pavlopoulos received Angelos Syrigos at the Presidential Mansion on Wednesday to discuss the incident, with sources saying the president offered assurances he would seek condemnation of the assault from all political parties.

Syrigos was beaten up in February by two Panteion students he reprimanded for spray painting slogans on campus. One of the two students has already been convicted of assault, with the other due to stand trial next week.

Last month, some 35 anti-establishment protesters barged into an events hall in the northwestern city of Ioannina where Syrigos was speaking and started smashing microphones and other equipment.