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Athens. Violence erupted on the sidelines of a Greek protest against government austerity measures on Thursday, with riot police firing tear gas at hooded youths hurling firebombs and vandalizing stores.

Clashes erupted at the start of a union protest and outside the nation’s Parliament as Greece was gripped by a second general strike in two weeks.

A few dozen hooded youths infiltrated a union protest near the Athens Polytechnic and threw a firebomb and stones at police, who responded by firing tear gas.

The youths torched a car and set fire to garbage bins before fleeing. Soon afterwards more youths attacked police outside parliament, vandalizing a dozen stores in the surrounding area, police said.

In the northern city of Thessaloniki, protesters threw eggs and yoghurt cartons, pilfered from a supermarket, at a government building, police said.

Two separate protests in Thessaloniki drew around 5,000 participants apiece, they said.

In Athens several thousand demonstrators had earlier marched on the Greek Parliament. Around 50 police officers in uniform and some 200 firemen joined the protest to voice their opposition to state employee pay cuts. An earlier demonstration by Communist workers that drew several thousand participants ran its course without incident.

Clashes between youths and police frequently break out near the polytechnic, the site of an uprising by students in 1973 that was brutally repressed by the military junta then ruling the country.

Greece ground to a halt on Thursday in the second general strike in two weeks, crippling public transport and closing schools, hospitals and government offices. The strike was called by the General Confederation of Workers, Greece’s main union, and the civil servants union Adedy, who between them have more than 1.3 million members.

The unions are opposed to broad spending cuts announced by the Socialist government which is struggling to contain a debt of nearly 300 billion euros ($408 billion) that has put pressure on the 16-nation euro zone.

 

Agence France-Presse