On Friday, the 34-year-old man will apologize to the investigator. police officer of the DI.AS team.who shot him in the head 16-year-old Roma Kostas Frangulis early Monday morning in Diavata Thessaloniki. He is accused of attempted murder with possible intent, and yesterday he appeared before the prosecutor and investigator, accompanied by his lawyer Sotiris Terzudis.

In his pre-trial testimony before his colleagues from the Homicide Prosecutor’s Office of the Thessaloniki Police Department, the 34-year-old man stated that he had no intention of hitting the 16-year-old in the head and that he pulled the trigger. reflexively—”instinctively,” as he reportedly said himself—when he saw that his colleagues were in danger of being swept away by an agricultural vehicle driven by a young gypsy.

Chronicles

The incident happened early Monday morning. A 16-year-old teenager stopped at a gas station on Monastiriou Street, poured in 20 euros of gasoline and left without paying. The owner of the gas station immediately notified the DIAS police officers who were at the gas station at that moment. They got on motorcycles and chased after the village, which was driven by a young gypsy. According to the 34-year-old cyclist EL.AS. According to his testimony during the preliminary investigation, the driver of a rural car tried to knock down police cars. The first attempt was made at a traffic light on Monastiriou Street, where a 16-year-old teenager allegedly turned the steering wheel sharply to the right, but the police avoided a collision. Two other assassination attempts were carried out – always according to the description of the police – at the site of the injury of the 16-year-old boy, on Palaia Simachaki Odos Street, which, however, is only 500 meters from the petrol station. The policeman’s lawyer told K that the young man allegedly turned around twice, moving towards one of the two cars. The 34-year-old man then fired once into the air to intimidate him and a second time aimed at the car’s tires to immobilize him. Instead, the bullet shattered the rear window of the villager, pierced the headrest of the driver’s seat and hit the unfortunate Kostas Fragulis in the back of the head. He was taken to Hippocrates in Thessaloniki, where he underwent a lengthy operation to remove a projectile from his brain. Yesterday he remained in the hospital in an extremely critical condition.

“I shot instinctively,” the 34-year-old told his colleagues.

The lawyer for the 16-year-old’s family, Theophilos Alexopoulos, filed a civil suit yesterday with the Thessaloniki court. Twenty-four hours earlier, he told K that a policeman fired a direct shot at a 16-year-old teenager, while indicating that DIAS officers. they knew they were after a minor gypsy who had run away without paying 20 euros, not a dangerous criminal.

Episodes

The serious injury of Kostas Fragulis as a result of police shelling caused incidents not only in Thessaloniki, but also in Corinth and Attica, near the areas where the Roma camps are located. Groups of young people attacked the police and stopped traffic on the main roads. During the incidents around 20:00 in Auliza, in Menidi, two policemen were hit by stones and were taken to the 401st military hospital of Athens.

In Thessaloniki, gypsies gathered on Pontou Street and set up barricades, burned tires, threw stones at and set fire to two construction vehicles. A protest was also held near the Tsairia Gypsy camp in Perea. In Athens, traffic was stopped for a long time on the old Athens-Korinth highway, in Megara, and tensions arose on NATO Avenue in Aspropyrgos with rock-throwing and Molotov cocktails by Roma groups holding protests.