http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/11/greek-police-protester-human-shield
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/09/greek-antifascist-protesters-torture-police
Trying to find more pics but there are only the same few online atm.
edit: This has nothing to do with some police conspiracy about serving the Germans. It's the expected consequence of a police service in any country that faces cuts and cuts again.
Greek doctors are running out of basics like bandages, and that leads to shittier quality of care and no doubt a whole bunch of bad practices such as under-qualified doctors, fewer nurses, back-alley operations, bribing to beat the queue, etc. You apply the same lack of resources to a police force and the effects will be it diminishing into nothing but a boys club for thugs who want to get their rocks off throwing their weight around.
Greek authorities have launched an investigation into allegations that riot police used a female protester as a human shield during angry demonstrations over a visit to Athens by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, this week.
Witnesses told the Guardian the young woman, who has yet to be identified, was frogmarched in handcuffs ahead of riot police as protesters threw stones at officers.
The inquiry into the human shield allegations was opened after photographs of the incident began to circulate on the internet, triggering condemnation of the tactics law enforcement officials stand increasingly accused of employing in Greece. "It is being investigated," said Lieutenant Colonel Christos Manouras, Greece's police spokesman. "We want to find out what these pictures hide."
In the pictures, a young woman, her faced daubed in white anti-teargas solution, with a pink rucksack on her back, is seen being escorted by riot police before being placed in front of the unit when it encounters stone-throwing protesters. Witnesses said the woman appeared to be disoriented and terrified as she was marched through Athens in handcuffs.
Foula Pharmacides, a shipping company employee, had participated in the demonstration outside parliament, but fled down a side street off Syntagma Square when police fired teargas to disperse the crowds. She described terror on the woman's face. "As the squad moved down Xenofontos Street with the girl, the protesters appeared," she said. "Then when the protesters started throwing things, the cop holding the girl takes her from the front of the unit to the back to face them and he starts moving her like a shield from left to right.
"The girl was falling down and he was picking her up. She was crying and clearly terrified. I couldn't believe it. You only ever see this sort of thing in the movies. Everyone started screaming 'Shame on you! Shame on you!' I remember there were two women next to me and they were crying, too, and screaming for the police to stop."
Sokratis Michalopoulos, another witness, said the episode ended when the "booing got so loud" and the riot squad decided to move on. "I don't think I will ever forget her face," said the 36-year-old television technician. "It was as if she were an object not a human being and I think she was in shock. She was definitely being used as a shield. Thank God photographers were there and we now have cameras on phones otherwise people would think we were mad. No one would believe us."
Veteran photographer Spyros Tsakiris, who also witnessed the incident, said the riot policeman who had been holding the woman had written "killer" in English on one of his bag straps.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/09/greek-antifascist-protesters-torture-police
Greek anti-fascist protesters 'tortured by police' after Golden Dawn clash
Fifteen anti-fascist protesters arrested in Athens during a clash with supporters of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn have said they were tortured in the Attica General Police Directorate (GADA) – the Athens equivalent of Scotland Yard – and subjected to what their lawyer describes as an Abu Ghraib-style humiliation.
Members of a second group of 25 who were arrested after demonstrating in support of their fellow anti-fascists the next day said they were beaten and made to strip naked and bend over in front of officers and other protesters inside the same police station.
Several of the protesters arrested after the first demonstration on Sunday 30 September told the Guardian they were slapped and hit by a police officer while five or six others watched, were spat on and "used as ashtrays" because they "stank", and were kept awake all night with torches and lasers being shone in their eyes.
Bruising on the protester's leg Some said they were burned on the arms with a cigarette lighter, and they said police officers videoed them on their mobile phones and threatened to post the pictures on the internet and give their home addresses to Golden Dawn, which has a track record of political violence.
One man with a bleeding head wound and a broken arm that he said had been sustained during his arrest alleged the police continued to beat him in GADA and refused him medical treatment until the next morning. Another said the police forced his legs apart and kicked him in the testicles during the arrest.
"They spat on me and said we would die like our grandfathers in the civil war," he said.
A second group of protesters also said they were "tortured" at GADA. "We all had to go past an officer who made us strip naked in the corridor, bend over and open our back passage in front of everyone else who was there," one of them told the Guardian. "He did whatever he wanted with us – slapped us, hit us, told us not to look at him, not to sit cross-legged. Other officers who came by did nothing.
"All we could do was look at each other out of the corners of our eyes to give each other courage. He had us there for more than two hours. He would take phone calls on his mobile and say, 'I'm at work and I'm fucking them, I'm fucking them up well'. In the end only four of us were charged, with resisting arrest. It was a day out of the past, out of the colonels' junta."
Trying to find more pics but there are only the same few online atm.
edit: This has nothing to do with some police conspiracy about serving the Germans. It's the expected consequence of a police service in any country that faces cuts and cuts again.
Greek doctors are running out of basics like bandages, and that leads to shittier quality of care and no doubt a whole bunch of bad practices such as under-qualified doctors, fewer nurses, back-alley operations, bribing to beat the queue, etc. You apply the same lack of resources to a police force and the effects will be it diminishing into nothing but a boys club for thugs who want to get their rocks off throwing their weight around.