ATHENS – Two teen brothers charged with savagely attacking a Greek metro station who told them to wear COVID-19 masks – kicking him while he was down – have been jailed for now but even if convicted of felonies would serve little time.

They haven’t been named in accordance with Greek privacy laws that keep people’s names out of the media if they are minors and even if they’re not unless they are prominent people in the public eye.

They were to appear before a magistrate Jan. 19, being held after refusing to give fingerprints to the police, facing an additional charge of disobedience as well as premeditated aggravated assault.

While the felony charge has a sentence up to 10 years, they would be released at 18 because the attack occurred when they were minors which could see the older not jailed because it takes months or years for cases to come to court and if held it would be in a youth facility.

A 26-year-old police motorcycle patrol officer is facing charges of dereliction of duty and harboring a criminal for providing advice on evading capture to the teens' mother and was put on administrative leave, said Kathimerini.

The report said after they were captured on surveillance cameras in the brutal attack in which they were kicking the victim at the Omonia station, that they got on another subway car, got off at the next stop and phoned their mother to get them.

She had already contacted the police officer, the paper said, but it wasn’t indicated his relationship with the family or why he allegedly offered them advice on how to avoid capture or how to act if they were apprehended.

While there were multiple videos of the attack, including from security cameras, that tracked the movements of the two brothers it was an anonymous tip that led police to monitor their cellphones, as well as their mother's, with no report whether she would be charged.

The two brothers had cursed and spat at the stationmaster on a train after he told both to wear masks and told one to lift his feet off a seat. They followed him as he exited the train at a central station and attacked him on the platform.

Wearing masks in transport vehicles is obligatory in Greece because of the Coronavirus pandemic but is often not done, even in places such as supermarkets where there is crowding and people wearing them on their chins.

(Material from the Associated Press was used in this report)