Greek firefighters have found the bodies of 18 people in an area of north-eastern Greece ravaged by a major wildfire that has been burning for days, authorities said on Tuesday.
Greek police activated the country’s Disaster Victim Identification Team to identify the bodies, which were found near a shack in the Avanta area of the Alexandroupolis region, fire department spokesman Ioannis Artopios said in a televised statement.
Given that no reports of missing people had been filed in the area, authorities are examining the possibility that the casualties were migrants who had entered the country from the nearby border with Turkey, he added.
Authorities were forced to evacuate a further eight villages and a city hospital as firefighters battled wildfires that spread across the country on Tuesday.
Gale-force winds and high summer temperatures have hampered the efforts of hundreds of firefighters backed by dozens of water-dropping aircraft as they tackle wildfires breaking out across Greece.
The fire risk level for several regions, including the wider Athens area, was listed as “extreme” for a second day on Tuesday.
Authorities have banned public access to mountains and forests in those regions until at least Wednesday morning and ordered military patrols.
On Monday, the blazes left two people dead and two firefighters injured in northern and central Greece.
About 65 of the more than 100 patients in the Alexandroupolis hospital in north-eastern Greece were transported to a ferry docked in the city’s port as the country’s largest wildfire currently burning out of control entered its fourth day. Others were taken to other hospitals in northern Greece.
The flames turned the sky over the city and across the region red, hiding the sun as choking smoke and swirling flecks of ash filled the air.
A school, several homes and a cemetery were damaged in two villages near Alexandroupolis, where more than 200 firefighters were battling the flames, supported by four planes and three helicopters.
Dozens more houses were damaged by another wildfire in the Kavala region, local authorities said, while a separate fire in the Evros border region was burning through forest in a protected national park.
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