Shooting spree by fired Greek worker seen as cautionary tale amid crisis
AFTER more than 30 years as a factory worker, Dimitris Manikas was dreaming of his retirement and a third marriage when a redundancy notice blew his hopes away.
Laid off from his job at a trash can factory in the northern Greek town of Komotini, the 52-year-old father of two called off his wedding – even though he had bought the wedding bands. Without any income, he feared his house would be next to go.
Driven to despair, last week he barged into the factory whose name he had tattooed on his forearm, to turn a hunting rifle on his former boss and another worker, injuring them both.
Manikas then held three people hostage, surrendering only after 11 hours of negotiations with police.
In his first public comments since being arrested, a tearful Manikas said losing his job pushed him over the edge.
“I was nothing without a job. I was like a dead man walking,” he said. “I only needed a few more years to retire. Is this a time to be unemployed? And if I looked for a job, the way things are now, the way politicians have done things, what would I get – 400 (R4 000)?
“My life was fine, I was ready to get married for a third time. I had bought the wedding rings. But my world was turned upside down. You can’t do anything without money.”
Officials have played down Manikas’s shooting spree as an isolated incident that is unlikely to be repeated, but many Greeks also see it as a cautionary tale of the human toll of an economic crisis that has left over one in five Greeks jobless.
With Greece struggling through its worst post-war economic crisis, European partners and the International Monetary Fund have made a painful diet of spending, wage and pension cuts a precondition for loans to keep it afloat.
“The way things are going financially, thousands of people could end up in my posi- tion,” Manikas said.
“People need to stand up to this – not the way I did – but they need to react.”
He said he showed up that day at the Helesi factory gates because he wanted to ask his former boss, Sakis Andrianopoulos – a man whom he had known for decades and who was the best man at his wedding – why he had been fired. He said he regretted what happened next.
“I didn’t know what I was doing that day, my mind was blurred. I’ve already told my lawyer that I’m sorry, I didn’t want things to end this way. I wanted to talk to him and clear things up.”
His former employer – now nursing wounds to the neck and chest in a hospital – is unimpressed. His company says it fired Manikas in August last year after he displayed erratic and inappropriate behaviour for years.
Andrianopoulos acknowledges that he has had to lay off staff due to the economic crisis that has hit towns like Komotini hard, but says that was not why Manikas was fired.
“This has nothing to do with the crisis,” he said, describing Manikas as a “sick man”.
Manikas’s defenders, his lawyer and Anastasia, the woman whom he had planned to marry, offer a different version of events.
They paint him as a hardworking man who did not have a history of mental illness but rather, was thrown into depression after losing his job.
Things started turning sour financially for Manikas as they planned their wedding. When he was fired, he broke up with her on account of his bleak prospects, Anastasia said.
Despondent, he began to fret that the house he lived in would be taken away from him.
“He was thinking, who’s going to hire a 52-year old now?” she said. “He didn’t want to see anyone. He wanted to be alone.”
She recalled happier days, of New Year’s Eve parties and family affairs, when Manikas was far from a man in tatters. “I asked him ‘When were you really happy in your life?’ And he said ‘Two years ago – when I had a job’.” – Reuters