Russia Sends in Firefighters As Greek Minister Says Sorry for Losing the Battle Against 3,000 Forest Fires

Two giant water bombing aircraft from Russia yesterday weighed into the fight against scores of fires raging across Greece as Athens' conservative government, fending off claims of ineptitude, apologized for its handling of the disaster.

As President Vladimir Putin stepped in at the request of the prime minister, Costas Karamanlis, dispatching two amphibian planes and several helicopters to Greece, the scale of the crisis became ever more apparent with fires ravaging villages, farmland and forests for a third week.

"I must say sorry to all those who have suffered [loss as a result of the fires]," said the interior minister, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, on a tour of Corinth where large areas of land resemble a war zone. "No government could be satisfied with this. It is the responsibility of the state to ensure this doesn't happen."

An estimated 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares) of land have been destroyed in some 3,000 wildfires across Greece since June. Last week, panic-stricken British tourists told how they had only minutes to pack up and flee as giant flames raced towards hotels in Skala on the southernmost tip of Cephalonia.

"One minute the fire was in the distance, the next it seemed to be very near and all hell broke out," said Clive Baker from Birmingham, who was among 4,000 holidaymakers evacuated from the resort. "I grabbed my wife and boy and said 'We're out of here.' It was like pure cold fear, terrifying."

Record-breaking temperatures, which last Thursday soared to 45C (113F) in Athens, are believed to have sparked some of the fires but the Greek media said there was growing evidence that arsonists in the pay of developers were also behind them.

Yesterday, a 26-year-old man was jailed for setting fire to a forest, while police believe an 87-year-old woman was also behind an arson attack in northern Greece.

"[We are in] a war against land grabbers and developers, as well as citizens who decide to build their homes on forestland," wrote the commentator Marianna Tziantzi in the authoritative center-right daily Kathimerini.

Despite EU funds and repeated pleas from Brussels, Greece still lacks a land registry nearly 180 years after it proclaimed independence from the Ottoman empire. In recent weeks, as illegal construction has mushroomed in areas cleared by fires, environmentalists have blamed the mayhem on the legal void.

"We don't have the appropriate laws to protect forests and are the only country among the European Union's original 15 members that, as yet, doesn't even have proper forest maps," Achilles Plitharas at Greece's WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature) branch told the Guardian: "In such circumstances, it's very hard to determine where a forest begins and ends and all too often corrupt officials turn a blind eye when arson is involved."

The fires had laid waste to vast tracts of hardy oak and fir forests that would take decades to re-grow, Mr Plitharas said. "In ecological terms this is a disaster. Greece's biodiversity has suffered tremendously and the summer is not even over."

Eight people, including three firefighters, have died in the fires. Last night, as the country braced for its third heatwave in six weeks, blazes were raging from Crete in the south to the heavily wooded Kastoria area in the north.

Large areas of Mount Grammos, close to the once verdant border with Albania, were also ablaze triggering fears that brown bears could soon begin invading nearby towns if forced to descend from its slopes.