Greece’s citizen protection minister has firmly denied that an anonymous email cracked one of the country’s most notorious unsolved crimes, insisting that recent arrests over the deadly Marfin firebombing were the product of years of painstaking police work rather than a single lucky tip.
Speaking on Skai radio, Michalis Chrysochoidis dismissed as “myths” and “narratives” the reports suggesting a tip-off had driven the breakthrough. He said he was puzzled by the speculation around the case and argued that the priority should be delivering justice and not recycling conjecture and speculations.
The Marfin arson attack was one of the darkest chapters of the Greek debt crisis years. During a mass demonstration in central Athens on May 5, 2010, protesters firebombed a branch of Marfin Egnatia Bank on Stadiou Street. Three employees, including a pregnant woman, died of smoke inhalation after being trapped inside. No one had been convicted in the years since, and earlier attempts at prosecution had collapsed.
Years of work, not a lucky tip
Chrysochoidis said evidence-gathering on the Marfin arson attacks began back in 2019. After he returned to the ministry in 2024, he explained, the case file was handed to Greece’s so-called “Greek FBI” and the homicide division, which reassessed the existing evidence from scratch.
“Not because some email arrived,” he stressed, crediting months of work by investigators. He said he and the officers involved had worked on the file for two years, and that in the end they all agreed on specific conclusions. The findings, he added, have already been forwarded to the investigating magistrate and the prosecutor’s office, with all related material now in the hands of the judicial authorities.
He also acknowledged past failures in the investigation, recalling how individuals charged in 2014 were ultimately acquitted.
Argos: officers “went too far”
Turning to the shooting in Argos, a town in the Peloponnese where police shot a 20-year-old man in the head during a vehicle pursuit, Chrysochoidis conceded the officers involved had not acted properly. The young man, who was reportedly unarmed and on the autism spectrum, later died of his injuries. The two officers involved are being held in pre-trial detention.
“The police’s mission is to arrest killers, not to kill children. Here the officers did not act correctly. They went too far, and a human life was lost,” the minister said. He described the incident as something that “should not have happened” and argued that the conduct of the officers would be judged by the courts.
A warning against jumping to conclusions
Responding to opposition criticism over arrests coming 16 years after the Marfin attack, Chrysochoidis complained that “instead of looking at how justice will be served, we embarked on coming up with different scenarios.”
The minister pointed to the case of Vasilis Tzortzatos, who had been arrested and released in the past after objections from rights campaigners, only to later be convicted as a member of November 17, the far-left group that carried out assassinations in Greece for nearly three decades before its members were arrested in 2002. “Let everyone be careful,” Chrysochoidis said.
