Five people have been arrested by the Greek authorities in the July 4 killing of a well-known University of California, Berkeley, professor, including his ex-wife and her current boyfriend, the police said.
The suspects made their first appearance in court on Thursday on charges of intentional homicide in the shooting of Przemyslaw Jeziorski, 43, who taught quantitative marketing at the Haas School of Business.
The police did not name any of the suspects, including Mr. Jeziorski’s ex-wife, whose lawyer, Alexandros Pasiatas, told the Greek news media that his client had no involvement in the killing. He also denied that the former spouses were having custody issues.
Mr. Pasiatas did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Neither did Ermis Papoutsis, a lawyer for the ex-wife’s boyfriend, who told reporters in Greece that his client had “accepted responsibility” for the killing, without elaborating.
While visiting Agia Paraskevi, a northern suburb of Athens, Mr. Jeziorski, who was born in Poland and was known as Przemek, was approached by an attacker during the afternoon on July 4 and was shot in the chest and back, the Greek police said.
At the time of his death, Mr. Jeziorski was seeing his two young children and making legal arrangements for future visitation, something his ex-wife, who is Greek, had tried unsuccessfully to block him from doing, officials said.
In May, Mr. Jeziorski applied for a restraining order against his ex-wife, according to records filed in Superior Court in Alameda County, Calif. In his request, which was reported by The San Francisco Chronicle, he accused his ex-wife of making threats and of attempted extortion. He also said that her boyfriend had assaulted him twice while he was visiting his children in suburban Athens.
The five suspects were taken into custody on Wednesday, according to the police, who said that the attack had been instigated by Mr. Jeziorski’s ex-wife, 40, and was carried out by her boyfriend, 35, who is also Greek.
Among the five were three accomplices whom the authorities identified as two Albanian nationals, who are 24 and 16, and one Bulgarian, who is 30.
