Several universities in Greece have been occupied by protesters as part of a wave of rioting and unrest that has swept the country in the wake of the police shooting of a 15-year-old boy in Athens on Saturday night, the Reuters news agency reported. “Most of the clashes have occurred in university cities and have involved students,” the BBC reported.

Campuses in the capital and Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, have been taken over, and the Agence France-Presse news agency reported that several university officials had said that their campuses would remain closed for at least another day.

Athens Polytechnic University is located in the leftist neighborhood where the boy was killed, and according to The New York Times dozens of police officers were injured while trying to seal off streets around the university.

“It remained unclear whether the authorities would try to get permission to storm the state university,” the Times reported, noting that “police and the military have been banned from college campuses since army tanks in 1973 rammed the gates of the school to quash a student uprising against the military junta at the time.”

The riots, the worst in Greece in decades, come as tensions between students and the government already run high. Last Thursday clashes erupted at a protest in Athens over controversial government plans to ease restrictions on private universities in Greece. —Aisha Labi