The Greek authorities recovered the charred remains of 11 people believed to be migrants after the vehicle they were traveling in collided with a truck in northern Greece and both vehicles exploded early Saturday morning, the police said.
The crash occurred about 5:30 a.m. near the town of Kavala, and both vehicles burst into flames, a regional police official said. All 11 people in the car were killed, while the driver of the truck, a 39-year-old Greek man, escaped before the explosion and was hospitalized with minor injuries.
The victims were trapped in the car and couldn’t get out, the police said. They were believed to have been migrants because the car they were traveling in was linked to a human-trafficking operation, the authorities said.
The driver of their vehicle had ignored a police signal to stop for a routine inspection earlier in the morning, the police said, adding that the authorities did not pursue the car. It is likely that the migrants had crossed into Greece from Turkey and had been heading to Thessaloniki to apply for asylum, the police said.
Video footage on state television showed two blazing wrecks: the car crushed beyond recognition and the truck gutted by flames. DNA tests are planned for the remains of the victims to identify their ethnic origin, the police said.
The crash occurred a few days after the authorities found the bodies of three women near the Turkish border with their throats cut. The three were also believed to have been migrants, though the police have not released information about their origin. The Greek news media have speculated that smugglers had killed the women to make an example of them after they failed to pay for their transfer.
In recent months there has been an increased influx of migrants from Greece’s land border with Turkey. According to Greece’s migration minister, Dimitris Vitsas, about 12,000 migrants have crossed into Greece so far this year, up from 3,300 in 2016 and 5,500 in 2017.
The increased flow has prompted the authorities to build extensions to the facilities in northern Greece to host the new arrivals, and new venues are expected to open soon. The transfer of hundreds of migrants from overcrowded state camps in the Aegean Islands is also increasing pressure on facilities on the mainland.
The European migration commissioner, Dimitris Avramopoulos, is to arrive in Ankara, the Turkish capital, on Monday for talks with officials about a deal between the European Union and Turkey to curb migration across the Aegean Sea.
An increased influx of migrants this year, though far short of the crisis in late 2015 and early 2016, is further straining island camps, where rights workers are warning of a mental health emergency.