Greek police finally arrested two suspects Friday for the 2010 firebombing of a Marfin bank branch in Athens that killed three employees — fourteen years after a mob trapped workers inside a burning building and shouted for them to be left to die. That it took nearly a decade and a half to produce any arrests in a triple homicide tells you everything about who the system protects and who it forgets.
On May 5, 2010, tens of thousands of Greeks joined a general strike to protest austerity measures imposed in exchange for the country's first international bailout. The protest turned violent. Some in the crowd hurled Molotov cocktails into the Marfin bank branch along the march route. The fire spread fast. Employees who made it to a small balcony, choking on smoke, heard people below yell that they should be left to burn — because they had the audacity to work during a general strike. Firefighters were delayed by the crowd. Three bank employees died: one man, two women, one of whom was pregnant.
Then the institutional machinery did what it does. An initial suspect was acquitted of all charges, according to the Associated Press. Three bank officials were convicted in 2013 — not for killing anyone, but for failing to take adequate safety measures inside the branch. The people who threw the firebombs? Nothing. The inquiry went cold. Authorities didn't even reopen it until 2020.
Contrast that with what happened last week. On July 1, unknown assailants firebombed three homes linked to Greece's governing conservative New Democracy party in Thessaloniki. A 72-year-old mother of one of the party's parliamentary candidates died of burns; four others were injured. By Friday, counter-terrorism police had three suspects in custody. Reuters reported that police linked the arrested suspects to the fatal third attack. Days, not decades.
Greece's Minister for Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, bundled both sets of arrests into a single statement.
