THOUSANDS of people took to the streets of Athens, Thessaloniki and other cities in Greece on Tuesday night to protest at police violence following the shooting of a Roma teenager.

Police in Thessaloniki, the country’s second city, shot Kostas Frangoulis, 16, in the head on Monday morning.

Kostas, who was still fighting for his life this afternoon, is accused of leaving a petrol station without paying for fuel worth €20 (£17.20).

Greece’s Roma communities and many others were immediately reminded of the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Roma Nikos Sampanis in similar circumstances last year. 

On that occasion, officers in Perama, near Athens, fired 36 bullets at the vehicle, killing Mr Sampanis, who was in the passenger seat.

The official account of Monday’s shooting is “a copy and paste” of last year’s, according to human rights lawyers and campaigners.

The European Centre for Roma Rights has reported on the extreme “marginalisation and state repression” of Roma communities in Greece.

State violence and authoritarianism also go wider. Tuesday was the anniversary of the police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos in Athens in 2008.

He was not Roma but part of a generation of young people provoked into staging militant protests by the economic slump which followed that year’s international financial crash.

On the day Kostas was shot the right-wing Greek government, which is mired in a growing scandal over the tapping of the phones of political opponents and public figures, gave a €600 (£517) bonus to every police officer in the country. 

The last two years have seen the police abusing Covid-19 health measures to clamp down on political protests and people in working-class neighbourhoods gathering carefully outdoors to socialise.

Kostas’s family have sworn to fight for justice. Their cause is resonating, despite the racism that sees the Roma communities as alien to Greek society and national life.