Coast Guard officers ambushed by armed men in central Athens after drug raid

Two Greek Coast Guard officers were injured when their unit was attacked by a group of about 50 masked individuals shortly after a drug-related raid in a house in the district of Exarchia on Thursday night.

Authorities had been tipped by an Iraqi national whom they had arrested earlier in Piraeus with 200 grams of cannabis and were looking for his supplier.

A team of eight officers from Piraeus’s security division, accompanied by a prosecutor, raided a house on Themistokleous and Eresou streets in Exarchia, where they remanded two women and confiscated 1.5 kilos of cannabis and a precision scale.

As they were exiting the building they were ambushed by men in black overalls, hoods and helmets, armed with clubs and knives, while some even brandished AK 47 assault rifles.

The prosecutor was safely evacuated, but one officer was injured on the thigh with a knife and another was kicked and punched. They were both transferred to the Athens’s Navy Hospital where they remain for treatment.

The attackers also stole the guns from the two officers while one of the women who had been detained fled.

The coast guard said in a press release its officers “showed restraint” and did not use their weapons to avoid “an all-out clash with unpredictable results.”