Thousands of students and others rioted in Athens and throughout Greece today on the one-year anniversary of the police murder of 16 year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos.

The 2008 killing sparked weeks of rioting that caused millions of Euros in damage.

Police and demonstrators have provided very different accounts of the events of the day, but both sides appear to agree that as of Sunday evening, several hundred demonstrators are holed up in the University of Athens, which is under blockade.

In Greece, as in a number of other countries, police are forbidden by law to enter university grounds. There are reports from demonstrators that this ban has been violated in the vicinity of the campus gates, but a full-scale raid would likely provoke a major escalation in the crisis.

More news when I get it…

10:00 pm | Here’s a link to a post I put up last year on the roots of the Greek riots, and a set of links to the rest of my coverage of last year’s rioting: One, two, three, four. Also, the Twitter hashtag for the current disturbances is #griots.

7:30 am New York time | Greek police claim that 150 of the protesters are foreign anarchists who came to Greece for the riots, and the list of those arrested reportedly includes a handful of Italians, Spaniards, and Albanians. No reports of Americans yet. More marches and rioting are expected this afternoon.

10:30 am New York time | This Agence France-Presse article (in French) says that a group of hundreds of adolescents, some as young as twelve, threw stones at Athens police this afternoon. It also says that the occupation of the president’s office at the University of Athens has ended, and that the protesters arrested so far include several Italians and Albanians as well as Canadian, Turkish, Spanish and French citizens.