A Greek extremist group on Monday claimed to have murdered an anti-terror officer guarding a witness in a left-wing militants' trial, a police source said.
The outfit, Revolutionary Sect, claimed responsibility for the fatal shooting of officer Nektarios Savas last Wednesday in a proclamation contained in a CD disk left for Greek daily Ta Nea, the police source said.
The daily, which has published the group's last two proclamations, is expected to give further details on the new text within the day.
Savas was shot dead by three assailants on motorbikes who opened fire as he sat in his car in the Athens district of Ano Patissia, marking the first death claimed by a Greek extremist group in nearly a decade.
The officer was guarding the home of Sofia Kyriakidou, a state witness in the 2004 trial of four followers of People's Revolutionary Struggle (ELA).
ELA, Greece's most notorious extremist outfit after the dreaded November 17 group, ceased its activities in 1995 after some 250 attacks on police, banks, government offices and US interests.
The four, including Kyriakidou's ex-husband, were sentenced to 25 years in jail but later released, mostly for health reasons. One of them, Costas Agapiou, died from cancer the day after the officer's murder.
The police had suspected from the start the involvement of Revolutionary Sect after finding 24 nine-millimetre cartridge cases at the scene matched to a weapon already used by the group which emerged in February.
At the time, it had machine-gunned a police station and the headquarters of a private television channel in Athens and had warned of further indiscriminate attacks on police.
The attacks have forced police back to the drawing board less than a decade after the 2002 dismantling of Greece's deadliest far-left organisation November 17, blamed for 23 murders between 1975 and 2000, including two police officers.
Extremist hits against police and business targets intensified after police fatally shot a teenager in December, unleashing a wave of youth protests and violence which emboldened radical groups according to analysts.
November 17 had carried out the last murder linked to extremism in Greece, the fatal shooting of Britain's military attaché Stephen Saunders in 2000.
