Arson suspected in deadly blaze
Greek officials find ‘serious indications’ of criminal activity
ATHENS, GREECE— Frantic relatives headed to the Athens morgue Thursday to seek the fate of loved ones still missing after Greece’s deadliest forest fire in decades, a blaze that Greek authorities said they increasingly suspect resulted from arson.
Public Order Minister Nikos Toskas said satellite image analysis and ground inspections provided “serious indications” the fire that quickly broke out in multiple places Monday and killed at least 82 people was set deliberately.
“We have serious indications and significant findings of criminal activity concerning arson,” Toskas said. “We are troubled by many factors, and there have been physical findings that are the subject of an investigation.”
He declined to provide more details.
The fire department’s special arson section, which probes all major fires, was conducting the investigation to determine how the wildfire started. The cause of the blaze has not been established. Before Toskas’ news conference, the mayor of the area where it broke out said it might have been sparks from a severed electricity pylon cable.
The death toll from the fire inched up Thursday morning, when the fire department put the number of people killed at 82. Rescue crews and volunteers continued to search on land and at sea for more victims. Many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition, making identification difficult.
At the morgue, relatives were informed about the steps needed to match one of the bodies held there to a missing person, including providing DNA samples and dental records.
“The procedure is difficult, harder than that of other mass disasters which we have dealt with in the past as a forensics department,” coroner Nikolaos Kalogrias said. “Here, the main cause of death was burning, in most cases the complete burning (of the body), so identification is very difficult.”
Germany’s federal criminal police said a team of its forensics specialists was in Greece to help authorities identify the dead. The team members have worked on major disasters such as the 2002 plane crash in Ueberlingen, Switzerland, and the 2004 Asian tsunami.
The fire broke out near Rafina, northeast of Athens. Fanned by gale-force winds, it raced through seaside resorts of fulltime homes and vacation residences popular with Athenians and tourists.
The large area the flames swept through further complicated the process of identifying victims. Officials said there was no way of knowing how many people were there at the time. By Thursday afternoon, there was still no official number of missing.