Witnesses describe the nightmare of the arson attack in Thessaloniki
Eyewitnesses recount the dramatic moments of the overnight attack on an apartment block in Thessaloniki. Within minutes, smoke had reached the sixth floor.
"Wake up, you're on fire": Eyewitnesses recount the early hours of the tragedy
Hospitalised at Hippocrates Hospital in Thessaloniki, an eyewitness to the murderous attack that struck an apartment block in the early hours of Wednesday, spoke to ERT and described the horrific night step by step. According to the Newspaper of Editors, the testimonies shed light on the chaos that prevailed inside and around the building.
"I woke to a muffled sound, not exactly an explosion," the witness stated. "I heard car alarms and went out with my wife to the balcony to see what was happening." The neighbours, he said, were shouting that there was smoke in the lobby and asking someone to go down with a fire extinguisher.
He decided to go down alone, not realising the extent of the destruction. "As soon as I opened the lift door, I saw the car was engulfed in flames. I was afraid to go out, because I would essentially be walking into the fire, and I went straight back up," he described. Within minutes, windows started breaking, smoke poured into the building and, as he said, "breathing was scorching."
Aphrodite Nestor lying on the balcony
The witness and his wife heard voices from the stairwell and opened the door of their flat to help. Shortly afterwards, they realised that Aphrodite Nestor had taken refuge on their balcony. "When the fire brigade came and the smoke cleared a bit, we found her lying on the balcony. We revived her and she kept repeating 'my parents, my parents, my dad, my mum'. She was in a state of shock," he said.
He then went out to the building, located rescuers and led them to the fifth floor. "Come to the fifth, there's a person," he told them. They came and took her away. As for the family, he noted that there was absolute confusion: "Everyone was looking for the others." He expressed hope that, despite Aphrodite's serious burns and her father's injuries, "at least as far as I know they are not in immediate danger."
"From the opposite apartment blocks they were shouting to us: wake up, you're on fire"
A second resident of the apartment block, Ms Anastasia, also spoke of the dramatic moments she experienced. She first expressed her condolences to the Nestor family, noting that the loss of human life is deeply sorrowful. "There was panic. From the opposite apartment blocks they were shouting to us 'wake up, you're on fire'. We went out to the balconies and the smoke had already reached the sixth floor, where I was," she stated.
She heard voices in the corridor and called on the residents to come up to her flat. Shortly afterwards, someone knocked persistently on the door. "A man came in along with a thick cloud of smoke," she said. Initially they thought the fire had broken into the flats. "Later I realised that the man who came in was Mr Nestor," she noted. The man was in a very poor psychological state, had burns on his head and hands and kept shouting: "My wife, my daughter."
Shock and darkness inside the building
Ms Anastasia described how Mr Nestor was convinced that his family had not survived. "He kept telling me 'they're lost, they're lost, they're dead'. I was trying to reassure him," she said. On the balcony they could see ambulances collecting injured people and tried to give him courage. When EKAB rescuers arrived, they told him that his family had been taken to hospital, but he still did not believe it.
Inside the building, she said, there was no visibility at all: the electricity had been cut off and smoke covered everything. "It is a relatively quiet neighbourhood. No one I spoke to had seen or heard anything before the explosion," she concluded.
Source: Efimerida ton Syntakton