The relevant justice minister on Monday evening promised to modify a law aimed to ease prison overcrowding in Greece, which was ratified under his predecessor, but which has been blamed for freeing felons convicted of violent crimes that subsequent committed new offenses.
Minister Stavros Kontonis made the statement hours after a violent home invasion in a coastal Athens district, an incident that left one of the suspects dead after he attempted to flee the upper floor apartment by jumping from balcony to balcony, another two in custody and the eventual escape of the fourth.
Press reports on Tuesday morning claimed the four suspects, all foreign nationals with purported criminal records, had been freed under the prison overcrowding law, passed by the leftist government in 2015 amid heightened criticism by the opposition.
The fourth suspect reportedly hid for up to 14 hours in a closet, undetected, only to emerge at midnight on Tuesday and flee by threatening the same tenants with a handgun.
The latter incident was treated as a police fiasco by the press a day later.
The initial incident began on Monday morning when the son of the two elderly tenants inside the apartment broken into by the suspects called police after watching the home invasion unfold on CCTV screens he was monitoring. The man had installed security cameras inside the apartment, in the upscale Paleo Faliro district. The suspects were armed.
Away from the crime scene and within the legislature's halls hours later, Kontonis promised to change the law in order to prevent convicted murderers and rapists from using the loophole to achieve an early release.
In a Tweet later in the day, main opposition New Democracy (ND) leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis stated that "Innocent citizens are paying for the (ideological) obsession (entailed) in the Paraskevopoulos law. We will abolish it (the prison overcrowding law)."
Mitsotakis referred to the previous SYRIZA MP, Nikos Paraskevopoulos, who served as justice minister and who brought the controversial law to Parliament for ratification.
