ATHENS, Greece — Firefighters rushed helicopters and buses Monday to evacuate more than two dozen villages threatened by towering walls of flames that had killed 63 people while ravaging swaths of forest and farmland in Greece’s worst wildfire disaster in memory.
Four days of devastating blazes from the northern border with Albania to the southern island of Crete unnerved and angered Greeks, drawing strong criticism of the government’s response and setting off widespread suspicions and finger-pointing.
The government, which declared a state of emergency, implied the destruction could be part of an orchestrated campaign of arson. But environmental experts, including the World Wildlife Federation, expressed skepticism.
People used garden hoses, buckets, tin cans and branches in desperate — and sometimes futile — attempts to beat back flames and save their homes and livelihoods.
Frightened people called television stations pleading for help from the beleaguered fire service, and helicopters or vehicles were sent to several villages to evacuate threatened residents, although some insisted on staying to fight the flames.
The destruction was so extensive that authorities said they had not had time to tally the amount of burned land — or the number of people injured. Sixty-three people were known dead.
Fanned by strong, hot winds, flames raced through grass and trees parched by three heat waves since June. Fires engulfed villages, forests and farms and scorched woodland around ancient Olympia, birthplace of the Olympic Games.
New fires broke out faster than others could be brought under control, leaving behind a devastated landscape of blackened tree trunks, gutted houses and charred animal carcasses.
A prosecutor on Monday ordered an investigation into whether arson attacks could come under Greece’s anti-terrorism and organized crime laws. On Saturday, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said it could not be coincidence that so many fires broke out simultaneously in so many areas.
Villagers made similar charges. “These fires were set deliberately, it happens all the time,” said Adrianna Katsiki, 45, from the fire-damaged village of Varvassaina in a part of the western Peloponnese that suffered 42 deaths.
In past fires, land developers have been blamed for fires, allegedly using blazes to sidestep laws that ban construction on forest land. Greece has no land registry, so once a region has been burned, there is no definitive proof of whether it was forest, farm or meadow.
“I think it is unlikely that land development was an incentive behind the arson,” said Nikos Bokaris, head of the Panhellenic Union of Forestry Experts. “The afflicted areas are not prime targets for construction. These are mountain areas where land is not that valuable.”
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