Greek Terrorist Attack Kills Two Members of Golden Dawn Political Party

The story comes from The Telegraph.

Golden Dawn members killed outside party office


Two members of Greece's far-Right Golden Dawn party have been killed in a drive-by shooting outside a party office in Athens on Friday.

The government and opposition parties quickly condemned the attack, which the left-wing main opposition Syriza said "targets democracy" in Greece.

The two victims, aged 22 and 27, were shot at close range from a motorcycle carrying two men, Georgios Germenis, a Golden Dawn MP, said.

"A man got off a motorcycle wearing a helmet and shot them," he said, adding the attack was captured on a security camera at the party office in Athens' Neo Iraklio suburb.

A third man, aged 29, was taken to hospital with severe gunshot wounds.

The shooting occurred amid a government crackdown on Golden Dawn following the Sept. 17 fatal stabbing of an anti-fascist musician in Athens. A Golden Dawn supporter has been arrested and charged with murder. The party's leader and two of its MPs have been jailed pending trial on charges of forming a criminal group. The party has denied any wrongdoing.

Golden Dawn, which rose from obscurity during Greece's financial crisis, won 18 of Parliament's 300 seats in last year's elections and is now polling as the recession-plagued nation's third most popular political party.

Police said no arrests were made and the counterterrorism squad has taken over the investigation. There has been no claim of responsibility, but Greece still has active far-left and anarchist extremist groups that have claimed a string of shootings and bombings that killed two policemen and a journalist.

"We are examining every possibility, but the indications are that it is a terrorist attack," a police official said.

A Golden Dawn statement also blamed the shooting on terrorists.

"The criminals wanted to execute anybody outside the party offices," the statement posted on Golden Dawn's website said. "Before they drove off, the terrorists shot again at the boys lying on the ground. They literally emptied their weapons on them."

Nikos Dendias, the public order minister, expressed "distress" at the fatal shooting of the two young men Friday. "We will not allow the country to become a ground for the settling of accounts, for whatever reason," he said.