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The number of racist attacks in Greece is increasing each passing day and the perpetrators are getting younger, some of them being even minors. Four young men aged 23, 20, 19 and 17 attacked the house of two immigrants from Pakistan in the village of Spata near Athens and tried to burn the motorcycle of a friend of theirs.

With hoods covering their faces, the attackers broke into the house of the two Pakistanis. The first boy broke the window of the front door with a hammer, the second one threw stones at the windows and the third young man poured gasoline on the motorcycle, which belonged to a friend of the two foreigners, and tried to set fire to it with burning paper.

The noise awakened the two Pakistanis, aged 26 and 32 respectively, and they began to cry for help. Neighbours knew that something was happening and went out to help them thus preventing the attackers from completing their plan.

They ran to the car, where their fourth accomplice was awaiting them, and disappeared. Meanwhile, the immigrants were able to write down the registration number of the car and called the police.

Law enforcement officials conducted an investigation in the regions of Spata and Artemis and detected the traces of the attackers after a call by a witness. They found the four youths very soon and apprehended them. The police found the 20-year old youth first, who confessed about the attack and directed the police to his accomplices. Two of them are students in private colleges, one works in a company dealing with war materials, and the fourth is a secondary-school boy. The police found at the house of the 19-year old boy a shotgun, which he possessed illegally, and cartridges and confiscated them.

"We went to burn the Pakistanis just like that. We were bored in the afternoon and decided to attack them," they said to the police. All four claimed they had no connection with far right organizations and determined their actions as "a spontaneous decision, a joke, caused by boredom." Only one of them said that they had organized the attack on immigrants, "because of an obscene gesture the Pakistanis had made at us earlier." His friends denied this claim.

Their parents: a baker, a retired former employee at Olympic airlines and a municipal policeman were extremely surprised by their children's involvement in such attacks. They all said that they had never had any trouble with foreigners.

The attackers said the same and one of them even admitted that in the past, he had been the target of racist attacks in Germany where he had lived with his family.

Both victims, immigrants from Pakistan, who reside in Greece legally and work in a printing house, claimed at the police station that they would not file a complaint against their attackers.

The lawyer of one of them stated for his part, "It was an imprudence of youths that has no other aspects." The three perpetrators of legal age will face the fast-track court on Wednesday and a juvenile prosecutor will investigate their accomplice, aged 17.