Thousands of migrants were forced to flee to safety when their camp on the Greek island of Lesbos was badly damaged in a fire apparently set on goal, police said.
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Some 5,000 migrants fled on Monday when dozens of tents and shelters at the Moria camp on the island of Lesbos were torched, in a blaze sparked when migrants of different nationalities got into a brawl.
Regional governor Christiana Kalogirou said she had repeatedly warned the government that camps on the east Aegean Sea islands were dangerously overcrowded.
Nine migrants were arrested on public disturbance charges after the chaotic scenes.
It happened when a fire swept through tents after reported violence among people living in the Moria camp.
Families with young children hastily packed up their belongings and fled into the nearby fields as the fire raged.
He reiterated UNHCR’s calls for the swift transfer of some migrants on the Greek islands to mainland Europe, saying the island camps had some 6,000 more people to find places for than capacity allowed. “There is an immediate need to take people off the islands because things will get even more hard”.
A total 5,400 migrants and other refugees live on Lesbos, which was the main destination for the more than a million people who reached Greece’s eastern islands from Turkey since the beginning of 2015.
The government said it would charter up to three passenger ferries to provide temporary accommodation, and increase the police presence on Lesbos.
“The EU and Greece can not carry on stockpiling refugees indefinitely on the Greek islands”, Amnesty International’s Giorgos Kosmopoulos said.
Authorities are not sure whether the blaze was started by migrants and refugees frustrated by long delays in processing and over crowding. “Holding thousands of vulnerable people on Lesbos in appalling conditions with no knowledge of their fate inevitably creates an incendiary atmosphere of fear and despondency”.
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“Last night’s fires at Moria on the Greek island of Lesbos symbolize the shortcomings of the European response to the refugee crisis”, said Panos Navrozidis, country director in Greece for the aid agency International Rescue Committee.
