Arsonists target ND MP’s car in Patra
The car of a New Democracy MP was set on fire while parked outside his home in downtown Patra on Thursday night, the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA-MPA) has reported.
“I heard an explosion and went out to see what was going on. That’s when I saw that my car was on fire and some neighbors were trying to put it out,” Iasonas Fotilas, a lawmaker with the conservative ruling party, told ANA-MPA.
Fotilas said that witnesses to the incident recounted seeing four people in hood near the car just before the blast. One of them poured some kind of liquid onto the vehicle, while another smashed a window and a third threw a homemade firebomb into the car’s interior. “The group then disappeared,” he quoted neighbors as saying.
Fotilas said that he will not be intimated, tough he did not specify why he thinks he may have been targeted, attributing the attack instead to the “usual” hooded youths. “I wonder why they think that such acts of intimidation will convince people of the righteousness of their demands.”
The New Democracy MP indicated that the attack may be linked to a student rally that took place in the western port city earlier in the day in protest at government measures to increase security at university campuses after a rector was attacked in his office in Athens last week.
