Athens (AFP)

A German journalist was attacked in Athens on Sunday during a demonstration by far-right activists against the presence of migrants in Greece, said a government source and the Greek news agency ANA.

Greek government spokesman Stelios Petsas condemned the "fascist attack" on Thomas Jacobi, a correspondent in Athens for the French daily La Croix and the German channel Deutsche Welle, and noted that an investigation had been opened.

According to an AFP reporter and a video broadcast on the Skai TV channel, journalist Thomas Jacobi was bleeding from the face after the attack.

Thomas Jacobi, who announced his intention to file a complaint, had collaborated on a documentary on the neo-Nazi Aube Dorée party, broadcast in 2016 and entitled "Golden Dawn: a personal affair", by journalist Angélique Kourounis.

"They attacked me because they recognized me. We made the documentary on Golden Dawn with Angélique Kourounis," Jacobi immediately said on the Greek news site Proto Thema.

"They beat me for four and a half minutes until the police appeared. No one intervened," he added.

"I thought I could do my job today, with so many police officers here. I was wrong again," he added, referring to his previous assault by members of Golden Dawn in Athens.

On January 20, 2019, he was attacked when he was covering with a cameraman and a photographer a protest demonstration in front of the Greek parliament against the new name of North Macedonia.

The attack was also condemned by the Foreign Press Association (FPA), of which Thomas Jacobi is a member, urging the authorities to take immediate steps to identify the culprits.

"The existence of groups of thugs organized on the sidelines of demonstrations intended to intimidate journalists with whom they do not agree, cannot be tolerated," the FPA added in a statement.

"We can only condemn" this attack, said the director of the French newspaper La Croix, Guillaume Goubert, to AFP. "We are concerned," he added.

Thomas Jacobi said he was lucky on Sunday not to have been attacked with a knife like Pavlos Fyssas, an anti-fascist rapper killed by an activist of Golden Dawn in 2013.

"Members of Golden Dawn, no matter how hard you hit us, no matter if you steal our phones and magnets like you did today, when ten of you attacked us and particularly Thomas, We will not back down. Our papers will be sent and the streets will remain ours, "warned Angelique Kourounis in a tweet in Greek.

According to Greek police, some 370 demonstrators, including members of Golden Dawn, participated in this rally punctuated by incidents on Syntagma Square on Sunday. They held up banners against "the colonization of Greece by the Islamists".

© 2020 AFP