Anniversary of the shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos

On 6 December 2008, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old student, was killed in cold blood by two policemen in Exarcheia in central Athens. The murder of Alexandros by the police resulted in large protests and demonstrations, which escalated to widespread rioting, with hundreds of rioters engaging riot police with Molotov cocktails, stones and other objects. Demonstrations and rioting soon spread to several other cities, including Thessaloniki, the country’s second-largest city.

Outside Greece, solidarity demonstrations, riots and, in some cases, clashes with local police also took place in more than 70 cities around the world including London, Paris, Brussels, Rome, Dublin, Berlin, Frankfurt, Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, The Hague, Copenhagen, Bordeaux, Cologne, Seville as well as Nicosia, and Paphos. In cities far away from Athens, solidarity often was expressed as a peaceful informational protest, for example Sao Paulo it proved that people could spread the news around the globe, from San Francisco to Wellington and Buenos Aires to Siberia.

Alexandros