A police officer stands in front of the house of Greek journalist Socratis Guiolas in Athens
Assailants gunned down an investigative journalist on Monday in front of his Athens home in an attack Greek police blamed on a far-left extremist group.
The authorities said 37-year-old Socratis Guiolias was killed by at least three people firing a pair of nine-millimetre handguns which the Revolutionary Sect group had used to kill an anti-terrorist officer last year.
"Examination of 16 nine-millimetre Parabellum cartridges found on the scene of today's homicide ... shows they were fired by two weapons used in the activities of the Revolutionary Sect group," the police said in a statement.
Although attacks by extremist groups are relatively common in Greece, journalists are rarely targeted.
Guiolias, whose wife is pregnant with their second child, was killed in front of his home in the middle class Athens suburb of Ilioupoli around 5:20 am (0220 GMT), the police said.
According to initial reports, the gunmen asked the journalist to come out of his house, claiming someone had stolen his car, and then opened fire.
Investigators had earlier said they are looking into all possible motives for the killing, including whether by criminals or extremists.
Guiolias was a manager at private Thema FM radio and had previously worked on one of Greece's main investigative journalism television shows.
He was also a co-administrator at one of the country's best-known blog sites, troktiko.gr (Greek for rodent), and was lately investigating a story on business corruption, state television NET said.
The Greek government condemned the murder as "cowardly" while the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe called on the authorities to bring the culprits to justice quickly.
"Mr. Guiolias was a well-known political blogger in his country, an investigative journalist often very critical of the previous government," the OSCE's representative for media freedom, Dunja Mijatovic, said.
"As the motives of his killing are still unclear, I ask the Greek authorities to ensure that his murder is investigated rapidly and thoroughly, and the public is continuously informed of this process," she said in a statement.
"I hope that the perpetrators of this horrifying murder will be very soon brought to justice," she added.
The Vienna-based International Press Institute also condemned the killing.
"We are deeply alarmed by this brutal murder, and call for a full investigation into whether Guiolias?s murder was connected to his work," IPI director David Dadge said in a statement.
"The perpetrators must be found and brought to justice.
"As a European Union country, Greece must demonstrate that this kind of violence will not be tolerated in a democratic society," he added.
Revolutionary Sect, which appeared after police fatally shot a teenage boy in December 2008, had in June last year shot dead an anti-terror officer guarding a witness in a left-wing militants' trial.
The outfit in February 2009 had also machine-gunned a police station and the headquarters of a private television channel in Athens and later warned of further attacks on police and journalists.
Most of the shots in the killing of Guiolias were fired from the gun that killed the anti-terror officer Nektarios Savas last June, the police said.
The second gun had been used in all three prior attacks.
The casings also matched a single cartridge found on the grave of the police shooting victim, 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, whose death in 2008 sparked violent protests across the country.
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