Horrific footage shows Syrian migrant setting himself on fire in a bid for asylum

A Syrian man set himself on fire at a migrant camp today on the Greek island of Chios in despair over his bid to gain asylum.



Video footage, posted on Twitter by the BBC's Greece correspondent, showed the 29-year-old migrant holding a petrol can and addressing camp residents, before being approached by a police officer.



The refugee poured a flammable liquid over himself and set it on fire, according to a police statement.



The unidentified man was rushed to hospital with burns over 90 per cent of his body, the Greek news agency ANA said.



The policeman who tried to save him was also hospitalized with burns following the incident on the eastern Aegean Sea island.



About 14,000 migrants seeking asylum live in camps on Greece's eastern islands, having crossed the sea from Turkey.
Many of them are Syrians fleeing war and are stuck there as a result of an EU-Turkish agreement that curbed the influx of migrants to the European Union.
Human rights groups have repeatedly criticised conditions in the camps.
Most of them have filed for asylum to avoid being sent back to Turkey, but these applications take months to handle.
Humanitarian groups have repeatedly sounded the alarm over declining morale in their camps.
In a separate incident, Greek police said today that they had arrested a people trafficker who imprisoned 23 South Asian migrants for a week in a bid to blackmail their families into paying money for smuggling them into Greece.



The 26-year-old Greek national was demanding between 1,500 and 3,000 euros (£1,300 to £2,500) a head. The migrants had only made an up-front payment.



Police were alerted by a migrant who complained that his brother and a nephew were being held in the warehouse in Menemeni, a small town near the northern city of Thessaloniki, a police statement said.