Molotov cocktail

The recent flurry of attacks by anti-establishment groups in Athens against riot police units and party offices, along with the storming of a ministry and a newspaper, have placed authorities on alert.

Riot police units stationed in Athens's Exarchia district were attacked by unknown assailants with Molotov cocktails on Friday night, authorities said on Saturday.

The incident occurred shortly after 10 p.m. on Tositsa Street, outside the old Athens Polytechnic.

Pity the poor princelings of the Polytechnic, those rebels with no regime to fight against, who confuse the symbolic buildings that they occupy with history itself, who think that the fumes of their Molotov cocktails make them equal to those who fought the junta in 1973, who, instead of clashing with tanks, burn trolley buses.

Hooded protesters threw petrol bombs and set off fireworks during clashes with Greek riot police in Athens on Tuesday on the eighth anniversary of a teenager's killing by police.

The fatal shooting of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in 2008, a year before Greece's economic crisis began, triggered the worst riots seen in Greece for decades and they lasted for weeks.

Police officers discovered a suitcase containing 149 Molotov cocktails in the lobby of an apartment block located on Notara Street in Exarchia, central Athens, on Sunday.

The petrol bombs were confiscated and taken to a police crime lab for further examination.

Anarchists and far-leftists claimed responsibility for a firebomb attack earlier this month against the police precinct in Exarchia, downtown Athens, saying the assault was an expression of solidarity against jailed anarchists and a protest against the government's creation of a "police state."

After hours of clashes between self-styled anarchists and riot police officers that started on Thursday night and continued into the early hours of Friday, municipal workers cleared a ton of debris from the area around the National Technical University of Athens, where the unrest caused widespread damage.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Friday issued a statement expressing "serious concern" over recent violence at the Souda migrant reception center on the Aegean island of Chios.

According to the international agency, the center came under attack for a second time on Thursday night by assailants throwing "Molotov cocktails and heavy stones," burning and damaging tents.

Greek police, on high alert for the ongoing visit of outgoing US President Barack Obama, are investigating a bag of makeshift firebombs found outside a soccer stadium near central Athens.

An Athens court on Monday acquitted 34-year-old defendant Theodoros Sipsas of all charges related to the firebombing of a branch of Marfin Bank in central Athens during an anti-austerity riot in 2010 that led to the death of three bank workers.