The suspects, a 34-year-old foreign national and a 33-year-old local man, were detained during a raid by Greek Police on Tuesday.

The 34-year-old was caught in the act of stripping electrical cables with specialized equipment to extract the copper, while the 33-year-old was found carrying a suitcase containing copper and cables.

Police said their investigation indicated that the two men were receiving metal objects, mainly originating from thefts, processing them at the premises and subsequently trading them for illegal financial gain.

The 34-year-old was also found to be operating without the required license for a professional metal-processing workshop. The processing activities were being conducted without environmental protection measures, according to police.

Officers seized a machine used for cutting and stripping copper cables, a quantity of pure copper, numerous copper cables and a small quantity of cannabis.

The specter of copper theft, vandalism

The latest arrests come amid a growing wave of copper theft across Greece, with criminal groups increasingly targeting public infrastructure, electricity networks, railway installations, construction sites and private properties to obtain valuable scrap metal.

Police recorded 1,025 copper theft incidents nationwide between January and September 2026, compared with 581 during the same period last year, according to figures published in recent local media reports.

The scale of the problem has become particularly evident in Athens, where municipal authorities have filed approximately 70 complaints over copper cable thefts during the past year, with an estimated nine kilometers of street-lighting cables stolen from the municipal network. The damage has left sections of roads and public squares without adequate lighting and has cost the municipality hundreds of thousands of euros to repair.

The issue has also acquired a particularly serious public-safety dimension following the deadly explosion in the historic Plaka district on Sept. 25, which killed six people.

Authorities believe that three men entered a residential building on Lysikratous Street and removed part of a copper pipe connected to its natural gas supply, causing a leak that preceded the explosion. The suspects have been arrested and face serious criminal charges.

The incident highlighted the potentially fatal consequences of metal theft when thieves target components of gas and other utility installations.

Police operations have increasingly focused not only on those stealing cables and other metal objects but also on the businesses and intermediaries receiving and processing the stolen material.

In a separate case in May, police arrested 20 people in a major operation targeting an alleged criminal network accused of systematically stealing electricity transformers belonging to the national power distribution network in the Karditsa area of central Greece.

The growing number of incidents has prompted calls for tighter controls on scrap-metal businesses, more effective monitoring of metal transactions and coordinated police operations to dismantle the networks connecting thieves with illegal processing and resale operations.