ATHENS – Supreme Court Prosecutor Isidoros Dogiakos ordered an urgent preliminary inquiry into the claims by the newspaper To Vima that unnamed high-ranking Greek police officers offered protection to underworld bosses.

The article said conversations on mobile phone chat apps such as Viber and WhatsApp, that are supposed to be encrypted, were about gang leaders executed in contract killings.

Top police officials could be heard saying that would help fuel smuggling rings and other criminals by not investigating them and allow them to operate without police interference, the report said.

A part of the conversations was revealed after the murder of a fuel station owner, that business said to involve mobsters demanding protection money from business owners and threatening them otherwise.

In December, 2022, gunshots were fired into the air outside a gas station in the northeastern Attica suburb of Glyka Nera with police investigating if organized crime rackets directed it, but no result yet.

State broadcaster ERT said that seven shots were fired from a car outside a gas station that is run by the family of a 38-year-old man who was gunned down in June that year in nearby Gerakas.

“I heard the first shot, got up to look at what was happening and saw the passenger shooting (while the car was) in motion,” an unnamed security guard working at the gas station at the time of the incident told ERT.

Investigators were said to believe the shots were fired in the air as a warning to the family of the murdered man, the victim’s father allegedly complaining his son was being blackmailed by a protection racket.