Kyriaki Griva walked into the Agios Anargyros police station in northwest Athens on April 1, 2024, frightened for her life and asking for help. She had filed multiple complaints against her ex-boyfriend before. And he was lurking outside her home again. She asked the police if they could escort her back home. The officers on duty told her to call the emergency line. The dispatcher who answered told her that police cars are not taxis. When Griva stepped outside the station, still on the phone to the dispatcher, her ex-boyfriend was waiting. He stabbed her to death on the threshold. Kyriaki Griva was 28 years old.
Two years later, a Greek prosecutor has recommended that four of the officers on duty that day stand trial for her death.
The prosecutor submitted a formal recommendation to the judicial council calling for the indictment of the station sentry, the duty officer, the shift supervisor, and the emergency dispatcher on charges of causing death through omission: that is, failing to act despite a legal obligation to do so.
“The accused are to be referred to stand trial as responsible for the fact that in Agios Anargyros, Attica, on April 1, 2024, acting intentionally through omission, they exposed another person and thus rendered her helpless, while they had a specific legal obligation to take action to prevent the outcome, and left helpless a person under their protection,” the prosecutor wrote in her recommendation. The prosecutor also requested that existing bail conditions imposed on the four following their formal depositions remain in place.
The recommendation now goes before a judicial panel, whose members will have the final say on whether the four are formally sent to trial.
The Griva case, one of several cases of femicide in recent years, shook Greece and reignited a long-running national debate over the failure of Greek institutions to protect victims of gender-based violence.
