Greek coroner tells of charred bodies on migrant trail
STORY: In the charred Greek landscape close to the border with Turkey, a group of blackened corpses lay amid the ashes of what was once a lush forest.
Two of the 18 dead were children.
The group of males are presumed to have been migrants, using the forest as cover to cross into the European Union.
One group of seven to eight bodies were found huddled together in what appeared to be a final embrace.
Pavlos Pavlidis is the coroner who was called to the scene on Tuesday (August 22).
"The posture indicated that these people were hugging. In other words, they realized at the last moment that the end was coming and it was a desperate attempt to protect themselves as much as they could. My guess is that these people were hugging."
They were found here near the village of Avantas in northeastern Greece where a fierce wildfire swept with devastating speed
One of hundreds across the country fueled by high temperatures and whipped up by gale force winds.
The president of the village said in the early days of the fire he'd pleaded with three groups of migrants to go to the village square
They were afraid of police but he told them it was better to be arrested than to burn alive.
This route taken by the migrants has proved popular among those from the Middle East and Asia.
But vegetation that was meant to offer protection to evade the Greek police turned into a death trap.
"What we understood from the site is that these people lived in an animal shed that was there and at some point, they noticed the fire and started to run, in order to escape the fire."
The people who perished in the forest are presumed to be among thousands who cross into Greece from Turkey every year.
Of the 18,700 arrivals to Greece last year, a third were via land, according to U.N. data.
Rights groups and the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR have long accused Greece of mistreating those at the border and sometimes forcibly pushing them back to Turkey - a practice illegal under international law.
Greece denies the accusations, saying its "strict but fair" migration policy protects the EU's borders.
