In Brief

WEEKEND EXODUS

Highway patrols boosted as thousands leave for weekend

Traffic police yesterday stepped up their presence on the national road network as thousands of city dwellers headed to other parts of the country for the long weekend. Most of the police units will be stationed at major junctions on the national highways and some diversions are expected to be set up by traffic police. Ports around the country were crowded yesterday afternoon as thousands prepared to board ferries for the islands.

HOUSE COLLAPSE

Two elderly villagers killed

Two elderly women, aged 74 and 86, were killed yesterday after a derelict house collapsed on them following heavy rainfall in the village of Kipia, near Kavala, in northern Greece. According to local residents, the women had emerged from the home of the younger of the two to inspect damage caused to the building when an adjacent derelict structure collapsed. The 74-year-old was killed instantly while the 86-year-old was transferred to hospital with serious injuries. She died a few hours later.

Tempe delay

Repairs on a key section of the Athens-Thessaloniki national road in the Vale of Tempe, central Greece, closed following a fatal landslide on December 18, will not be completed until mid-May at the earliest, it emerged yesterday. Larissa Prefect Loukas Katsaros said that the contractor who has undertaken the works on the crucial road section would not be completed by April, as envisaged last month by Infrastructure, Transport and Networks Minister Dimitris Reppas. In a related development, a landslide on the section of the national highway linking Tripoli and Sparti late on Thursday night led to police diverting traffic via the old national road.

Child molester

Police in Attica yesterday arrested a 47-year-old Greek man alleged to have frequented Internet cafes in the district of Kato Patissia, near central Athens, with the aim of meeting teenage boys who he is alleged to have subsequently lured to his home where he would play pornographic films and make sexual advances on them. The suspect is alleged to have invited the boys, aged between 13 and 16, to his home – sometimes individually and sometimes in a group. The 47-year-old is also alleged to have offered the boys additional small sums of cash and to have paid for their use of the Internet in the cafes he is reported to have frequented.

Safe lifted

Unidentified robbers early yesterday drove a truck through the glass front of a supermarket in the village of Aghioi Apostoloi, in the Cretan prefecture of Hania, and removed a safe containing some 20,000 euros, police said. The safe had been located near the entrance of the store, according to the supermarket’s management. The intruders did not touch an ATM machine on the premises of the store. Dozens of cash machines have been yanked out of walls in Crete in recent years.