Summary According to early reports, two male tourists were also lightly hurt in the shooting.
ATHENS (AFP) - Greek police on Wednesday said they had captured far-left extremist Nikos Maziotis -- one of the country s top fugitives -- after a shootout in central Athens.
"Nikos Maziotis has been arrested," a police source said, adding that a police officer had been injured in an exchange of fire near the tourist district of Monastiraki.
According to early reports, two male tourists -- a German and an Australian -- were also lightly hurt in the shooting, the police source said.
Maziotis himself, a leading member of defunct militant outfit Revolutionary Struggle, was more seriously injured and was taken to hospital for surgery, state news agency ANA said.
"I saw a man being taken away with his hands behind his back, he was bleeding profusely," a witness told reporters at the scene.
"I believe he was wearing a wig," she added.
Pictures of the scene posted online showed a man in a white shirt and grey trousers sprawled on the ground, his lower body and the sidewalk before him covered in blood. What appears to be a hairpiece lies beside his head.
Media reports said Maziotis was armed with a handgun and a grenade, which he threw at the police but failed to explode.
According to the reports, the fugitive was spotted in a camping store and attempted to flee in a taxi but was trapped in the area s narrow streets.
Maziotis, 42, and his companion Panagiota Roupa -- also a one-time member of Revolutionary Struggle -- had been conditionally released from prison in 2012 and subsequently disappeared.
They have a four-year-old son who was born in an Athens hospital a few months after his parents were imprisoned in 2010.
- History of violence -
Revolutionary Struggle, which first emerged in 2003, was once deemed by authorities to be the country s most dangerous far-left organisation and is is listed by the EU and US as terrorist groups.
The United States put a bounty on the group after it fired a rocket at the US embassy in Athens in 2007 without injuring anyone.
The outfit in April also exploded a booby-trapped car outside a Bank of Greece office in central Athens as Greece prepared to make a highly symbolic debt sale after a four-year absence. Nobody was hurt.
Other strikes include a bomb attack on the Athens Stock Exchange and several banks, and attempted assassination attempts against police and a former police minister.
Greece has seen a resurgence in extremist activity at a time when the country is struggling to emerge from a crippling six-year recession.
In November, two members of neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn were fatally shot outside an Athens district office, and another was seriously injured.
A month later, unknown attackers fired automatic rifle shots at the German ambassador s residence in Athens without causing any injuries.
In January this year, a prominent member of Greece s deadliest extremist group November 17, Christodoulos Xiros, disappeared while on prison leave. He remains at large.
Greece had offered a total four-million-euro ($5.4-million) reward for the arrest of several wanted extremists, including Maziotis, Roupa and Xiros.
