New Delhi: The death toll in the fire now raging through village and forest across Greece has risen to 69.
A helicopter swooped into a village in southern Greece to rescue residents trapped by flames on Monday.
One of the fires broke out on the fringe of Athens on Monday, but was quickly brought under control. Another scorched the woodland around the birthplace of the Olympics.
A helicopter airlifted five people to safety on Monday from the village of Prasidaki in southern Greece, said fire department spokesman Yiannis Stamoulis. Another was sent to the village of Frixa.
Fueled by strong, hot winds and parched grass and trees, the fires have engulfed villages, forests and farmland. New blazes broke out faster than others could be brought under control.
Forest fires are common during Greece's hot, dry summers — but nothing has approached the scale of the past three days.
"So many fires breaking out simultaneously in so many parts of the country cannot be a coincidence," Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said in a nationally televised address on Saturday.
Several people have been arrested on suspicion of arson since Friday, although some were accused of starting fires through negligence rather than intent. One man, however, was charged with arson and homicide in connection with a fire near the southern town of Areopolis on Friday that killed six people.
Building on forestland is forbidden in Greece, but unscrupulous developers are blamed for setting fires to forests in an effort to circumvent the law by disputing the area's status. Greece has no land registry, so once a region has been burned and cleared, there is no definitive proof of whether it was initially forest, farm or field.
The destruction has infuriated Greeks — already stunned by deadly forest fires in June and July. Outraged residents heckled Culture Minister George Voulgarakis Sunday when he visited Ancient Olympia to see the firefighting efforts.
The government appealed for help from abroad, and 19 countries were sending planes, helicopters and firefighters, including France, which dispatched four water-tanker planes and Russia, which was sending three helicopters and an amphibian plane.
The fires hit during the traditional August holidays when villages across Greece are filled with people Athens and other large cities returning to their ancestral areas.
Desperate residents appealed through television stations for help from a firefighting service already stretched to the limit. The government declared a state of emergency on Saturday.
The worst of the fires are concentrated in the mountains of the Peloponnese in the south and on the island of Evia north of Athens. Strong winds blew smoke and ash over the capital, blackening the evening sky and turning the rising moon red.
In the ravaged mountain villages in the Peloponnese, rescue crews found a grim scene that spoke of last-minute desperation as the fires closed in. Dozens of charred bodies have been found across fields, homes, along roads and in cars.
Weekend wildfires also killed two elderly people in neighboring Bulgaria, officials said Monday. They died in a fire that burned down their house in the southern village of Prisadets, said Darina Stamatova, spokeswoman of the regional administration.
An Associated Press photographer on the scene said almost all houses in the villages of Prisadets, Varnik and Filipovo were destroyed by the flames.
A blistering hot summer has led to more than a thousand wildfires across Bulgaria in the past three months burning down 84,000 acres of forests and farm fields, the government said.
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