Greek police say fatal Athens apartment blast was likely caused by improvised bomb

Greek police said on Friday that an explosion in an Athens apartment that killed a man and severely wounded a woman the previous day appears to have been caused by an improvised bomb.

Police searching the wrecked apartment seized two handguns and ammunition, authorities said in a statement, as well as mobile phones and other “digital evidence." The statement added that the blast is being investigated by the police’s special violent crimes unit.

Firefighters who responded to the explosion on Thursday afternoon freed the wounded woman from the wreckage, and later found the man’s body while using sniffer dogs to search the apartment for other survivors, the fire service said.

The injured woman is Greek, police said, while the dead man has not been identified. No further details on her identity were released.

The explosion in the capital’s central residential neighborhood of Ambelokipi demolished internal and external walls in a third-floor apartment, blowing away its balcony railings and damaging neighboring apartments.

Greece has a decades-long history of far-left extremism involving small urban groups, while organized crime and racketeering groups have also carried out small-scale bombings and targeted killings.

The major extremist groups that carried out a string of assassinations from the mid 1970s to the early 2000s have been eradicated and their members imprisoned.

They were succeeded by smaller and less efficient groups which mostly staged bomb attacks on symbols of state authority and wealth, but have been largely dormant in recent years.