Greece migrant camp in flames

A FIRE in a severely overcrowded migrant camp in Greece forced hundreds of people into the streets, compounding their plight with more refugees arriving on Greek islands daily in what an aid group called a worsening “nightmare”.

Greece sent more police to the island of Samos yesterday after the fire, which occurred two weeks after a deadly blaze at a troubled camp on nearby Lesbos triggered protests there.

The Samos fire flared outside the camp on Monday night, firefighters said, before spreading inside. Earlier, three Syrians had been taken to hospital with stab wounds suffered in a fight with a group of Afghans, police said.

Greece is struggling with the biggest resurgence in refugee and migrant flows since a 2015 crisis when more than 1 million streamed into Europe, many of them entering the continent via Greece.

A regional governor, Costas Moutzouris, described the situation on Greece’s frontline islands as “tragic” and called on the government to act.

More than half of refugees and migrants reaching EU territory this year from the Middle East, Asia and Africa have been to Greece, according to UN data.

EU migration commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos, addressing the Greek parliament yesterday, said Greece needed to do more to process its backlog of asylum claims.

He cautioned that Greece might not be able to deal with the potential refugee fallout from a military offensive launched by Turkey against Kurdish fighters in north-eastern Syria last week.