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full screen The woman was denied a ride home in a police car. Soon after, she was killed outside the police station. Archive image. Photo: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP/TT
Demonstrators gathered on Friday outside a Greek police station where a 28-year-old woman was murdered earlier this week, in protest against the violence against women that has claimed five lives so far this year.
The woman was killed by her former partner outside the station in northwest Athens, where she had gone to ask for help to escape the violence.
According to information from the police investigation that was leaked to the press, the woman was afraid that the ex-partner was following her and guarding her house. After alerting the police, she allegedly asked them to be driven home in a police car, as she feared the man. The officers refused her, and told her to call the police emergency number instead.
– The police car is not a taxi, says the emergency personnel in a recording of the call released by the police.
When the ex-partner attacked her with a knife, just outside the police station, she was still on the phone with the emergency center, according to the leaked information.
The man was arrested and placed on his own initiative at a psychiatric clinic. Five police officers have been removed from duty in connection with the incident, which Greece’s Minister of Citizen Security, Michalis Chrisochoidis, calls “one of the most difficult moments” of his career.