Helicopter Crew Killed in Greece Fires

Two hired Bell helicopters collided while battling a wildfire in the Psatha area west of Athens, the fire service said.

"The pilots...were taken unconscious to hospital, where their death was confirmed," the fire department's director of communications Vassilis Vathrakogiannis said in a televised address.

Television footage showed one of the helicopters colliding with the underbelly of the other helicopter before exploding and plunging to the ground.

The crew of the second helicopter was successfully rescued.

Hundreds of firefighters were attempting to keep a fire west of Athens from approaching the outskirts of Athens after it scaled a mountain overnight.

The fire department grounded all Bell helicopters in the area pending an investigation, state TV ERT said.

The two dead are a Dane and a Greek, said a statement from Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who had earlier warned of "extremely difficult" days ahead.

The accident raised the death toll from this week's Greek fires to five, after three firefighters died in Crete and the Peloponnese.

The helicopters had been leased from Australia's McDermott Aviation, part of a fleet of 15. The company has said it has supported operations in Greece for the past seven years.

Officials had warned for days that violent winds made fire-fighting operations from the air hazardous, and most aircraft had been sidelined until Aug. 2.

Mitsotakis had earlier said Greece was experiencing "extreme weather conditions" with winds that had reached 100 kilometres (60 miles) an hour.

"When the winds blow with such force, even the dozens of aircraft we have at our disposal cannot operate safely," he wrote on Facebook.

Vathrakogiannis said 220 forest and agricultural fires had broken out around the country since Monday.

Until then, Greece had been relatively spared from heat waves and major fires this summer, unlike France and Spain.

"We are perhaps going through the most difficult days of the summer," Vathrakogiannis said.

A 44-year-old man was arrested Aug. 2 on suspicion of deliberately starting a fire on the Ionian island of Cephalonia, according to the Greek news agency ANA.