ATHENS, Greece • Fire struck again Wednesday night in Greece’s notoriously overcrowded refugee camp on the island of Lesbos, a day after a blaze swept through it and left thousands in need of emergency shelter. The fires caused no injuries, but they renewed criticism of Europe’s migration policy.

Wednesday night’s fires broke out inside the parts of Moria camp that had not burned in the first blaze, sending people streaming from the camp with their belongings, according to an Associated Press photographer in the area.

Later, about 4,000 migrants who had left the camp for the island’s main port of Mytilini to board ships for the mainland threw stones at police blocking the road, and officers responded with tear gas, police said. There were no reports of injuries or arrests. Police said migrants also lit fires in fields near the site of the clashes.

Moria had been under a coronavirus lockdown when the first fire gutted a large section of it, and health officials said some of those who had tested positive for the virus had fled. “The combination of migration and the pandemic in these conditions is creating an exceptionally demanding situation,” Alternate Migration Minister Giorgos Koumoutsakos said. Civil protection authorities declared a four-month state of emergency for public health reasons on Lesbos.

Officials said the original fire was started by camp residents angered by the lockdown measures and isolation orders imposed after 35 people tested positive for COVID-19. The cases were found during broad testing and contact tracing after the illness of a Somali man who had been granted asylum and had left the island in July but later returned. The exact cause of the first blaze was being investigated, but “what is certain is that the fire was started, because of the quarantine, by asylum-seekers in the facility,” said Migration Minister Notis Mitarachi, who flew to Lesbos with Greece’s interior minister and the head of the public health organization.

“Instances of unlawful behavior such as the ones we experienced yesterday will not be left unpunished,” Mitarachi said. “Such behavior is not acceptable, and also respect for law and order is a necessary precondition for the asylum process.”

Some of those who had tested positive as well as some of their close contacts who had been moved to isolation had left quarantine following the incidents, National Public Health Organization head Panagiotis Arkoumaneas said. Eight of them and “a significant number of their close contacts” had been located and moved to a new quarantine area. In dramatic scenes early Wednesday, men, women and children fled fires that broke out during the night at multiple points.

Migrants flee from the Moria refugee camp during a second fire, on the northeastern Aegean island of Lesbos, Greece, on Wednesday. Fire struck again Wednesday night in Greece’s notoriously crowded refugee camp, a day after a blaze swept through it and left thousands in need of emergency shelter. The fires caused no injuries, but they renewed criticism of Europe’s migration policy.

the associated press