Last Updated on December 12, 2022
A group of far-left extremists in Greece have claimed responsibility for firebombings targeting vehicles belonging to an Italian diplomat. Multiple vehicles were torched outside the home of an Italian diplomat in Athens earlier this month, according to the Greek outlet Ekathimerini.
One car was destroyed and another severely damaged outside the home of Italy’s Deputy Ambassador Susanna Schlein, which was targeted by far-left anarchists in the early morning hours of December 2.
The alleged attackers took credit for the bombings on the far-left web platform IndyMedia this week. The group said the arson was in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito, an Italian left-wing extremist who has been convicted of multiple violent crimes.
Cospito, 55, was convicted in a non-fatal shooting targeting a nuclear energy manager in 2021, as well as a bombing attack in 2016. Cospito is imprisoned in strict isolation, which is typically reserved for Mafia members and is an incarceration provision known in Italy as 41-bis, Ekathimerini reported.
“We decided to send our own signal of solidarity to the comrade and his struggle against the 41-bis,” the group said.
Under the 41-bis provision, the Italian interior minister can suspend prison regulations for criminals convicted of mafia-style crimes or terrorism, Breitbart News reported. Prisoners can lose visitation rights, the ability to make phone calls or the ability to receive packages, among other things.
“41 bis is a regime of political, social and sensory annihilation, aimed at the complete elimination of all contact with the outside world. The goal is none other than the physical and moral annihilation of those who choose the path of revolutionary self-righteousness against the tyranny of state and capital,” the far-left anarchist group alleged in their statement.
The attackers justified the targeting of the Italian diplomat by saying that “the acts of revolutionary antiviolence that target them, returning a piece of the fear they sow against society, letting them know that they are not invulnerable and that their decisions come at a cost, are at the same time the targeting of the policies and plans of the system.”
Last year, over 100 acts of violence were attributed to supporters of Greek convicted killer and far-left extremist Dimitris Koufontinas, Breitbart News reported. Koufontinas formerly belonged to the communist militant group Revolutionary Organization 17 November (17N) and was convicted of a total of eleven assassinations and murders that took place from 1975 to 2000.
