Member of the militant Revolutionary Struggle group Paula Roupa (centre) is escorted by anti-terrorist police officers during her transfer in a court in Athens, yesterday.
Athens: Greek anti-terrorist police yesterday recaptured a female member of a far-left group that has claimed a string of attacks, who had been on the run for over four years.
Police launched a dawn raid on a flat in Athens and detained Paula Roupa from the now-defunct Revolutionary Struggle, a group that has claimed bomb attacks and assassination attempts against police and politicians.
Reports said the 48-year-old Roupa surrendered without a struggle, while a local told Greek media she had been staying at the house in eastern Athens district of Ilioupoli for around two years. “She had never caused a problem,” said the man, whose sister lives in the building.
A local butcher who witnessed the raid said: “Around 30 masked anti-terror police entered the house...using crowbars to open the door.”
In a separate operation, police also detained a 25-year-old woman who they said was “aiding” Roupa.
Roupa and her co-leader and companion Nikos Maziotis were arrested together in 2010. They were conditionally released from detention pending trial in 2011 and subsequently disappeared.
Maziotis was caught in 2014 in the capital after a shootout with police. Two years later, Roupa unsuccessfully tried to spring him from prison using a hijacked helicopter.
The couple have a six-year-old son who was born in an Athens hospital a few months after his parents were imprisoned in 2010. The boy, who was with his mother yesterday, has been assigned to a police minors unit under supervision of a prosecutor.
Revolutionary Struggle, which first emerged in 2003, was once deemed by authorities to be the country’s most dangerous far-left organisation.
The US put a bounty on the group after it fired a rocket at the US embassy in Athens in 2007. No one was injured in the attack.
Police yesterday said Roupa has also been linked to a bank heist at an Athens hospital in 2015.
She has been handed a 50-year prison sentence over the group’s activities up to 2010, and an additional 11-year sentence over the Bank of Greece blast.
