Firefighters in Greece have discovered the bodies of 18 people in an area with a major wildfire

Firefighters on Tuesday found the burnt bodies of 18 people believed to have been migrants who had crossed the Turkish border into an area of northeastern Greece where wildfires have raged for days.

The discovery near the city of Alexandroupoli came as hundreds of firefighters battled dozens of wildfires across the country amid gale-force winds. On Monday, two people died and two firefighters were injured in separate fires in northern and central Greece.

With their hot, dry summers, southern European countries are particularly prone to wildfires. Another major blaze has been burning across Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Islands for a week, although no injuries or damage to homes was reported.

European Union officials have blamed climate change for the increasing frequency and intensity of wildfires in Europe, noting that 2022 was the second-worst year for wildfire damage on record after 2017.

In Greece, police activated the country’s Disaster Victim Identification Team to identify the 18 bodies, which were found near a shack in the Avantas area, fire department spokesman Ioannis Artopios said.

“Given that there have been no reports of a missing person or missing residents from the surrounding areas, the possibility is being investigated that these are people who had entered the country illegally,” Artopios said.

Alexandroupoli is near the border with Turkey, along a route often taken by people fleeing poverty and conflict in the Middle East, Asia and Africa and seeking to enter the European Union.

Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou expressed deep sorrow at the deaths.

Avantas, like many nearby villages and settlements, had been under evacuation orders, with push alerts in Greek and English sent to all mobile phones in the region.

Overnight, a massive wall of flames raced through forests toward Alexandroupoli, prompting authorities to evacuate eight more villages and the city’s hospital as flames reddened the sky.

About 65 of the more than 100 patients in the hospital were transported to a ferry boat in the city’s port, while others were taken to other hospitals in northern Greece.

Deputy Health Minister Dimitris Vartzopoulos, speaking on Greece’s Skai television, said smoke and ash in the air around the Alexandrouploli hospital were the main reasons behind the decision to evacuate the facility.

In the northeastern Evros border region, a fire was burning through forest in a protected national park, with satellite imagery showing smoke blanketing much of northern and western Greece.

New fires broke out in several parts of the country Tuesday, including in woodland northwest of Athens and an industrial area on the capital’s western fringes.

Small explosions echoed from the industrial area of Aspropyrgos as flames reached warehouses and factories. Authorities shut down a highway and ordered the evacuation of nearby settlements.

With firefighting forces stretched to the limit, Greece appealed for help from the European Union’s civil protection mechanism.

Five water-dropping planes from Croatia, Germany and Sweden, and a helicopter, 58 firefighters and nine water tanks from the Czech Republic flew to Greece Tuesday, while 56 Romanian firefighters and two aircraft from Cyprus arrived Monday. French firefighters helped tackle a blaze on the island of Evia on Monday.

“We are mobilizing actually almost one-third of the aircraft we have in the rescEU fleet,” said EU spokesman Balazs Ujvari.

The fire risk level for several regions, including the wider Athens area, was listed as “extreme” for a second day Tuesday. Authorities banned public access to mountains and forests in those regions until at least Wednesday morning and ordered military patrols.

Greece’s deadliest wildfire killed 104 people in 2018, at a seaside resort near Athens that residents had not been warned to evacuate. Authorities have since erred on the side of caution, issuing swift mass evacuation orders whenever inhabited areas are threatened.

Last month, a wildfire on the island of Rhodes forced the evacuation of some 20,000 tourists. Days later, two air force pilots were killed when their water-dropping plane crashed while diving low to tackle a blaze on Evia.

Source: AP