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Mourners stand around the spot where a man committed suicide at central Syntagma square in Athens April 4, 2012. | YORGOS KARAHALIS/REUTERS

Mourners stand around the spot where a man committed suicide at central Syntagma square in Athens April 4, 2012. | YORGOS KARAHALIS/REUTERS
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Pensioner’s suicide hits nerve in Greek debt crisis

ATHENS— Reuters

A cash-strapped Greek pensioner shot and killed himself outside parliament in Athens on Wednesday saying he refused to scrounge for food in the rubbish, touching a nerve among ordinary Greeks feeling the brunt of the country’s economic crisis.

The public suicide of the 77-year-old retired pharmacist quickly triggered an outpouring of sympathy in a country where one in five is jobless and a sense of national humiliation has accompanied successive rounds of salary and pension cuts.

Just hours after the death, an impromptu shrine with candles, flowers and handwritten notes condemning the crisis sprang up in the central Syntagma square where the suicide occurred. Bystanders gathered to pay their respects.

One note nailed to a tree said “Enough is enough,” while another asked, “Who will be the next victim?”

A few hundred protesters, some of whom undoubtedly took part in staged mass protests in 2011 against austerity measures imposed by foreign lenders in return for bailout loans, marched into Syntagma square on Wednesday evening.

By nightfall, the crowd around the suicide site had swelled to a few thousand, with some chanting: “This was not suicide – it was murder committed by the state.”

There were brief moments of tension near parliament when police fired teargas at a group of about a dozen protesters throwing gasoline bombs at them. Rocks were also thrown at a luxury hotel in the square.

Acts of suicide have been catalysts for provoking popular protest in the past. A Tunisian vegetable seller who set himself on fire in December, 2010, triggered the Arab Spring protests. In Athens, witnesses said the man appeared in the busy square during the morning rush hour, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger after yelling out: “I have debts. I can’t stand this any more.”

Another passerby told Greek television the man said: “I don’t want to leave my debts to my children.”

A suicide note found in his pocket blamed politicians and financial troubles for pushing him over the edge, police said.

The government had “annihilated any hope for my survival and I could not get any justice. I cannot find any other form of struggle except a dignified end before I have to start scrounging for food from the rubbish,” the note said.

Greece is stumbling through its worst post-Second-World-War economic crisis as austerity measures imposed to sort out the country’s messy finances push it into a fifth year of recession.

The latest data show suicides jumped 18 per cent in 2010 from the previous year as rising unemployment, higher taxes and shrinking wages drove ordinary Greeks to despair.

Last year, the number of suicides in Athens alone jumped over 25 per cent from a year ago.

Reuters