MATI

A man was convicted of involuntary arson on Monday for his role in Greece's deadliest wildfire in memory, and five former fire officials found guilty of misdemeanours linked to their response to the 2018 blaze, judicial sources said.

A court in Athens convicted five former senior firefighting and disaster response officials on Monday, over a 2018 wildfire outside the capital that killed more than 100 people.

The fire that swept through the seaside town of Mati, east of Athens, was the deadliest in the country's history. Residents and vacationers, many trapped in their cars, were killed as they tried to escape.

Six years after the devastating wildfire in Attica's seaside town of Mati and nearby areas, which claimed 104 lives and left dozens injured, a three-member misdemeanors court will issue its verdicts on the 21 defendants on Monday.

The testimony of dozens of fire and other officers and witnesses on the ground during the deadly 2018 east Attica wildfires point to a string of oversights that appear to lie mainly with the Hellenic Fire Service.

Around 260 hectares will be included in a new zoning plan for the east Attica seaside towns of Mati and Kokkino Limanaki which were impacted by devastating wildfires in 2018, while Provalinthos and Ampeloupoli will continue to be designated as forestland, the Environment Ministry announced Monday. 

A plan for the reconstruction of the fire-ravaged east Attica community of Mati will be posted for public consultation in June, Environment Minister Kostis Hatzidakis said during a visit to the coastal town on Friday.

Plans for Greece's new civil protect mechanism appear to put too much emphasis on fighting fires rather than preventing them, warns Professor Johann Georg Goldammer, director of the Global Fire Monitoring Center based at Freiburg University and senior scientist at the Max Planck Society for Chemistry, Biogeochemistry Department, who was invited by the previous government to lead a special commi

Greece's government is extending its offer of citizenship to Tom Hanks to his wife and their two children, in recognition of the family's help in assisting victims of a deadly wildfire near Athens in 2018.

A woman who lost her husband and two children in the July 2018 fire in the east Attica coastal town of Mati filed a new lawsuit with the Supreme Court prosecutor's office on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in a speech on climate change outlined plans to protect countries' cultural heritage and other measures such as the winding down of the use of lignite in Greece in an address to the UN.

The full text of the PM's address  to the UN Climate Conference is as follows: