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The United States' ambassador to Greece called for heightened vigilance against political violence on Tuesday, following the release from prison of Nikos Maziotis, the former leader of the militant group Revolutionary Struggle, after 14 years behind bars.
Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle said Maziotis's release was a reminder of the dangers posed by domestic extremism, describing him and his associates as having no place in modern society.
Writing on the social media platform X, she called their record of violence deserving of unequivocal condemnation and pledged continued vigilance against a return to the bombings and shootings that once plagued the country.
Maziotis led Revolutionary Struggle, a Greek far-left militant organization that the US State Department designated a foreign terrorist group in 2009. He was serving a sentence of multiple life terms for his role in the organization's activities when he was freed from custody on Monday.
His time in the group was marked by a pattern of arrests, flight and further violence. Police detained Maziotis along with six other members of Revolutionary Struggle in 2010, but he broke the terms of a conditional release two years later and went underground during his trial, according to the newspaper Kathimerini.
While Maziotis was in hiding, Revolutionary Struggle claimed responsibility for a bomb attack in April 2014 targeting a branch of Greece's central bank in Athens. He was recaptured a few months later, on July 16, 2014, after a shootout in the Greek capital's central tourist district that left four people wounded.
In her statement, Guilfoyle framed the case as part of a broader commitment to opposing political violence. "We will never go back to the era of assassination attempts, shootings, and bombings, and we will never cease in our pursuit of justice," she wrote, adding that the group's actions warranted what she called complete and total condemnation.
Revolutionary Struggle emerged in Greece in the mid-2000s as one of several far-left militant groups operating in the country, a period during which Greece saw a series of bomb attacks and shootings targeting government, financial and foreign targets. The group is separate from November 17, an earlier Greek militant organization dismantled by authorities in the early 2000s.
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