Four migrants and a suspected trafficker, all from Syria, died Saturday and six were others injured when their car collided head-on with another as it sped the wrong way on a major highway in Greece near the Turkish border, police said.
The driver of the other car, a 46-year-old Greek man, also died in the collision, police said.
The car, with the driver and other 10 passengers, some of them stowed in the trunk, was driving along an older road, away from the border, when it came upon a police checking point, near the city of Alexandroupolis, on Saturday morning. Signalled to stop, it rammed the patrol car that stood in its way and sped away instead.
Police say they followed at a distance.
The suspected trafficker entered the Egnatia Highway, northern Greece’s major east-west highway, when it collided head-on with the other car. Police said the drivers, both men, died instantly, as well as a man in the car carrying the migrants and a girl, who was sitting in the lap of the man in the passenger seat. Two more died in a hospital; the extent of the other six migrants’ injuries was not known.
Police said firefighters who rushed to the scene had a hard time extricating the people from the cars, which had sustained considerable damage.