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STV News
4 days ago
- Climate
- STV News
At least three dead as wildfires rage across southern Europe
Some European countries have sent forces to Greece and Montenegro to help tackle the fires, as ITV News' Chloe Keedy reports. At least three people have died and thousands have been forced to flee as wildfires continued to rage across southern Europe and the continent experiences a wave of extreme heat. Firefighting resources were stretched thin in many affected countries as they battled multiple outbreaks following weeks of heat waves and temperature spikes across Mediterranean Europe. Fires blazed on the Greek mainland, the Patras area and the islands of Zakynthos and Chios. Alongside firefighting efforts, residents have been trying to hold the flames off with buckets of water. Outside the Greek port city of Patras, firefighters struggled to protect homes and agricultural facilities as flames tore through olive groves. Residents were forced to flee with their pets into the sea, as the fire moved closer to the beaches. They were rescued by the Hellenic Red Cross, who transported them to safety by boat. On the Greek island of Chios, exhausted firefighters slept on the roadside after working all night to douse the flames. International cooperation has been required to tackle the large number of fires. Romanian and Czech fire crews were deployed to Megara, around 40 kilometres from Athens. Burned cars sit in a lot near Patras in Greece. / Credit: AP Greece, in turn, sent assistance to neighbouring Albania, where an 80-year-old man died in a blaze south of the capital, Tirana, officials said on Wednesday. Residents of four villages were evacuated in central Albania near a former army ammunition depot. In the southern Korca district, near the Greek border, explosions were reported from buried Second World War-era artillery shells. Montenegro has received aid from a number of countries after dozens of fires sparked across the nation. Croatia and Italy sent firefighting planes, Serbia and Croatia sent helicopters, and Australia dispatched firefighting crews. A Montenegrin soldier died and another was seriously injured on Tuesday, after a water tanker overturned. The accident was caused by reduced visibility from the thick smoke, according to authorities. Fires light up the mountainside on Tuesday night, near Montenegro's capital Podgorica. A firefighting volunteer in the hard-hit Castile and León region north of Madrid, where thousands have been displaced by evacuations, died fighting the blaze. Evacuation centres were full in parts of central Spain, with some people forced to spend the night outdoors on folding beds. Spain's government raised its national emergency response level, preparing additional support for regional authorities overseeing multiple evacuations and highway closures. A forestry worker was also killed on Wednesday while responding to a wildfire in southern Turkey, officials said. The Forestry Ministry said the worker died in an accident involving a fire engine that left four others injured. Turkey has been battling severe wildfires since late June. A total of 18 people have been killed, including 10 rescue volunteers and forestry workers who died in July. A seaplane drops water on a wildfire in Maceda, northwestern Spain. / Credit: AP In Portugal, more than 700 firefighters attempted to douse a fire in Trancoso, northeast of Lisbon. It was believed the fire was close to being extinguished on Tuesday after burning for five days, but high winds overnight reignited it several times, causing flames to creep closer to houses. One woman told Portugal's public broadcasting channel that residents had to step in to protect nearby buildings, as firefighters were deployed elsewhere. Authorities across European countries have cited multiple causes for the massive fires, including careless farming practices, improperly maintained power cables and summer lightning storms. Europe has also experienced another period of extreme heat, with temperatures soaring past 40 degrees Celsius in some areas. Scientists have warned that climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness across the south of Europe. The continent is warming up faster than any other in the world. Temperatures have increased at twice the speed of the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Services. Last year was the hottest on record, both globally and in Europe, according to the monitoring agency. Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
CBS News
30-04-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
Bodies found in Greece mass grave had "bullets in the heads," officials say
Workers were installing benches at a park in the ancient Greek port city of Thessaloniki when their excavator pushed brown soil off a fragile white skull. They turned off the motorized equipment and set to work with pickaxes and shovels. The crew found two skeletons, then more. By March, 33 sets of bones lay in a tight cluster of unmarked burial pits in the shadow of a Byzantine fortress. "We found many bullets in the heads, the skulls," supervising engineer Haris Charismiadis said, standing on earth overturned by four months of digging. It's common to find ancient remains or objects in Greece. But hulking Yedi Kule castle was a prison where Communist sympathizers were tortured and executed during Greece's 1946–49 Civil War. Tens of thousands died in the early Cold War-era battles between Western-backed government forces and left-wing insurgents, a brutal conflict with assassination squads, child abductions and mass displacements. CBS News journalist George Polk, who had depicted the right-wing Greek government as corrupt, was among those killed during the war. Construction crews uncover a mass grave in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece, on Feb. 28, 2025, containing remains believed to belong to dozens of prisoners executed during or after the Greek civil war. Municipality of Neapoli-Sykies via AP Greece's archaeological service cleared the site for development because the bones are less than 100 years old. But authorities in Neapolis-Sykies, a suburb of the coastal city of Thessaloniki, pressed on with excavation, saying the chance find has "great historical and national importance." Descendants have been coming to the site in recent weeks, leaving flowers and asking authorities to conduct DNA testing "so they can retrieve the remains of their grandfather, great-grandfather or uncle," said Simos Daniilidis, who has served as Neapolis-Sykies' mayor since 1994. As many as 400 Yedi Kule prisoners were executed, according to historians and the Greek Communist Party. Items found with the bodies - a woman's shoe, a handbag, a ring - offer glimpses into the lives cut short. Wartime legacy For the families of slain pro-Communist Greeks, the find in the Park of National Resistance is reviving a wartime legacy kept dormant to avoid reigniting old animosities. The small site has become Greece's first Civil War mass grave to be exhumed. Government forces executed 19-year-old Agapios Sachinis after he refused to sign a declaration renouncing his political beliefs. "These are not simple matters," his namesake nephew said during a recent visit to the site. "It's about carrying inside you not just courage, but values and dignity you won't compromise - not even to save your own life," said Agapios Sachinis, 78. A retired Communist city council member, Sachinis was imprisoned in the 1960s for his political activity during the dictatorship. Today, Greece's Communist Party belongs to the political mainstream, largely thanks to its role in the country's WWII resistance. If Sachinis' uncle's remains are identified, he said, he will cremate them and keep the ashes at his home. "I want Agapios close to me, at least while I'm alive," he said. Cold War playbook Greece's Civil War began in the wake of World War II. Coming after continent-wide destruction, it quickly lost international attention but the conflict marked a turning point: U.S. President Harry Truman's policy of anti-communist intervention - the Truman Doctrine - was presented to Congress in 1947 as a means to direct funds and military support to Greece. Etched on the newly excavated bones in Thessaloniki, then, is a playbook that went on to produce decades of repression, societal divisions and more unmarked graves in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Governments later addressing the Cold War-era abuses and atrocities faced a painful choice: To unearth the past - as attempted with investigative commissions in Eastern Europe and many Latin American countries - or suppress it for fear of fresh division. Author and historian Spyros Kouzinopoulos holds a newspaper announcing the Sept. 15, 1947, court ruling to execute 52 people being held at Yedi Kule prison, in Thessaloniki, Greece, Saturday, April 12, 2025. Thanassis Stavrakis / AP Greek emergency laws were gradually lifted and only fully abolished in 1989. Records of summary trials and executions were never made public. No political force pushed for the excavation of suspected burial sites. Politicians still use highly cautious language when addressing the past and the Thessaloniki discovery was met with a subdued public reaction. The find has not been directly addressed by the country's center-right government – a reminder that many Greeks still find it easier to walk past the country's ghosts than confront them. Decades ago, the neighborhood park in Thessaloniki - a densely populated port city of a million with ruins from the ancient Greek, Roman and Ottoman eras, with historically strong Balkan and Jewish influences - was a field on the outskirts of the city. Today, it's frequented by retirees and ringed by apartment buildings filled with middle-class families. During construction, residents whispered that bones had been discovered when foundations were laid, but no inquiry was conducted. "Flowers of their generation" Executions by army firing squads extended into the 1950s and were publicly announced, but graves were unmarked and secret. Author and historian Spyros Kouzinopoulos, a Thessaloniki native, spent decades researching the executions at Yedi Kule, including the indignities endured by prisoners in their final hours. After a military tribunal issued a death sentence, the chief guard would take the condemned prisoner to solitary confinement in tiny cells barely big enough to stand. Many would use their last hours to write letters to their families. At dawn, the chief guard and two others would retrieve the prisoner and hand them over to the firing squad. Most were loaded onto trucks to avoid attracting public attention. Sometimes they were led to their death on foot. Most of the victims were barely adults - youth Kouzinopoulos called "flowers of their generation." Two 17-year-old schoolgirls, Efpraxia Nikolaidou and Eva Kourouzidou, were executed while wearing their uniforms, he said. "It shook me to the core," Kouzinopoulos said. DNA testing City officials are taking steps to conduct DNA testing on the remains, and urging families of the missing to submit genetic material. That way, the bodies can be identified and returned to relatives. Agapios Sachinis, the septuagenarian whose uncle was executed, is among those eager to provide DNA. Mayor Daniilidis has ordered an expansion of the dig to other parts of the park in coming weeks. In a statement, the city said efforts to find other mass graves would continue "so that all the skeletons of the people who lost their lives in this way during the dark years of the Civil War and were not given the honors traditionally attributed to the dead are found."
