Three thieves strangled a young mother in front of her 11-month-old child on Tuesday after breaking into her home in an Athens suburb and tying up her husband, police said.
The thieves made off with money and jewellery after killing the 20-year-old woman, who was born in Greece but had a British passport, the police said. Her husband, a 33-year-old pilot, survived.
The 20-year-old mother was married to a 32-year-old pilot in the Greek Air Force. Caroline, as media identified the young British mother was a student the University of Piraeus.
The thieves reportedly left with some 10 to 15 thousand euros in cash and valuables.
Before sneaking into the house, they hung the family dog preventing it from barking and alerting the neighbours.
The perpetrators were speaking broken Greek.
According to latest information, in an effort to force the couple to tell them where they were hiding the money, the buglers threatened the baby with a gun.
They then tied the man to a chair and started torturing the young woman. She kept shouting and calling for help so they put a pillow over her face suffocating her to death.
Police believe that the thieves had previous information about the family's financial status and that a fourth man was the lookout outside during the burglary.
ANT1 TV reported that a neighbour had called the police that “something suspicious” is taking place in the family’s house before the husband managed to reach his mobile phone.
Greeks are used to gangland killings but the strangling of the woman in front of her child has shocked the locals tight knit community.
The Greek government has offered a €300,000 (about £257,000) reward to try to track down the culprits behind the murder of a British-born student in her suburban Athens home.
The reward was publicised hours after Caroline Crouch, 20, was strangled in front of her baby daughter by armed burglars who had bound her husband, Babis Anagnostopoulos, to a chair after breaking in.
Greece’s citizens’ protection minister said the county was reeling from the crime. “We are all shaken up and personally I am shaken up,” Michalis Chrisochoidis told the annual Delphi Economic Forum on Tuesday. “We rarely encounter such brutality in Greece, both in Greek society and in crime.”
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