In the criminal proceedings in Piraeus today, 13 Greek members of the crew of a yacht were charged, from which the forest on the island of Hydra, in the Argosaronic Gulf of the Aegean Sea, between Athens and the Peloponnese, was set on fire by firing fireworks on the night of Friday and Saturday.
The initially detained and suspected tourists from Kazakhstan, who rented a yacht for vacation, have been released, Greek commercial RTV SKAI reports.
The yacht was seized and brought to the shore near Athens and will be confiscated from the owner.
The Minister of Civil Protection, Vasilis Kikilias, announced today that based on the new Criminal Code, the punishment for starting a fire that causes ecological destruction can be between 10 and 20 years in prison.
In the fire, 30 hectares of highly flammable pine forest burned, where firework rockets fell. It was extinguished on Saturday by the deployment of six firefighting aircraft and two squads of land firefighters, who were withdrawn from extinguishing other fires in Greece, the minister said.
The news site protothema.gr writes that when the yacht's crew realized what they had done, they tried to put out the fire in the forest themselves, and when that failed, they informed the Fire Service and sailed away.
The captain of another ship sailing there heard noise and saw flashes of fireworks, which he reported to the Hydra Port Authority, and with the help of satellite tracking of the ships' path, the chartered yacht "Persefoni" was found, the crew of which was arrested, together with the Kazakh tourists.
Hydra is one of the main points of tourism for a rich clientele in Greece, especially nautical tourism. It got its name because it has an unusually large number of water sources, and it is very wooded. In order to preserve the strictly protected nature, there are no motorized vehicles on that island. The island's beaches are among the world-famous beaches.
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