The brutal murder of a 44-year-old female patient on Wednesday at an Athens-area state psychiatric hospital by another patient, a 47-year-man, has cast the national limelight on the institutional framework governing the remand of violence-prone schizophrenics and sociopaths.
The reason for the scrutiny is that the alleged perpetrator stands accused of killing another woman at a different psychiatric ward on the Ionian Sea island of Corfu last November.
The victim of Wednesday’s incident has reportedly been admitted the previous evening due to acute drug dependency.
The alleged perpetrator remained on the loose as of Wednesday afternoon, with a heightened police operation to locate the suspect underway around the specific hospital, in the extreme western Athens district of Dafni.
His arrest was announced later in the evening.
Media reports had the man appearing before orderlies soaked in the victim’s blood and admitting to stabbing her to death with broken glass.
