ATHENS (Reuters) The Greek cabinet minister in charge of the police force escaped unhurt on Thursday after a bomb in a booby-trapped package exploded next to his office, killing one of his closest aides, officials said.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, on the seventh floor of the ministry that caused serious damage to the office of Civil Protection Minister Mihalis Chrysohoidis.
"I lost a valuable and dear colleague," Chrysohoidis, visibly moved, told reporters outside the ministry. He had been in the building at the time of the explosion at 8.15 p.m.
The victim, George Vassilakis, adjutant to the minister, was father to two children.
"It was a wrapped package that exploded in the aide's hands after he apparently picked it up and tried to open it," police spokesman Thanassis Kokkalakis told Reuters. "We heard a big bang, there was a lot of smoke and damage."
There was no warning and no reports of other injuries.
Greece has been rocked by a series of bomb attacks claimed by leftist militants since its worst riots in decades in 2008. Earlier this year, Greece arrested six suspected members of the country's most militant group, Revolutionary Struggle.
When he took office in 2009, Chrysohoidis said that he would crack down on militants. In a previous spell in the job in 2002, he dismantled November 17, Greece's most lethal guerrilla group.
Greece is also facing a deep economic crisis and last month won a 110 billion euro ($147.6 billion) bailout package from the European Union and the IMF.
Three people died in a petrol bomb attack on a Greek bank during an anti-austerity demonstration in May. In March, a 15-year old boy was killed and his mother and sister injured after a bomb exploded outside a building in central Athens.
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