A 52-year-old man has been arrested in central Macedonia, after Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis filed a criminal complaint at the Cyber Crime Unit of Greek Police for threats and insults he received on social media.

It was the minister who made the incident and the arrest public on Friday morning, saying that the man was due to appear before a prosecutor.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Georgiadis said he woke to a series of messages targeting him, including images of the recent assault on Nepal’s finance minister by protesters, and identified a user named “Christos Sidiropoulos” whose posts, he said, “went beyond all limits.” He said the cyber crime unit informed him that the user had been detained and would face a prosecutor.

Georgiadis urged what he called an exemplary punishment, “not out of vengeance, but because we must not allow violence and toxicity to prevail in our society.” He said freedom of speech was non-negotiable but carried responsibilities, and warned that threats against him or his family would be met with legal action, including requests to lift anonymity where the law allows.

The Minister accused social media accounts “from the Far-Left and the Far-Right” of lashing out at him using the image of “Nepal’s communist finance Minister being lynched.”

Local media said the detained man was expected to be presented to a prosecutor on Saturday.