A 12-year-old schoolboy was crushed to death on Wednesday in the town of Iraklion, northern Crete, by a car lift in a car park built under an apartment block. Andreas Fanourakis left his house on Tuesday to play with friends and, at some point in the evening, went down into the underground car park of the building at 9 Idomeneos Street. He apparently got locked in and spent the night amid the cars. In the morning, when one of the building’s residents took the lift down to get their car, the boy was sitting on the edge of the lift shaft with his legs dangling down. The lift caught his legs and fatally mangled him.

Border police near the northeastern town of Soufli yesterday stopped a truck carrying 38 Iraqi immigrants, who had illegally entered Greece over the Evros River, to Athens. The truckdriver, Dimitrios Topalidis, 56, will be charged with immigrant smuggling. His passengers told police that thousands of migrants from Asia and Africa have gathered in western Turkey awaiting an opportunity to illegally enter Greece. Meanwhile, the Merchant Marine Ministry announced yesterday that harbor police in the northwestern Peloponnesian port of Patras arrested two Greeks — Dionysios Lymberis, 50, and Panayiotis Vrachas, 46 — on Wednesday for trying to smuggle an Iraqi illegal immigrant in their car onto an Italy-bound ferry. And on Cyprus, four Palestinian illegal immigrants were arrested in the tourist resort of Ayia Napa after arriving in a fishing boat which they then sank to hide their tracks.

A schoolteacher was charged on Wednesday with the murder of his partner, a fellow teacher, in their flat in the Cretan town of Iraklion on Monday. Michalis Tsourakakis, 40, told police he had accidentally choked Georgia Dimopoulou, 36, to death during a heated argument by placing his hand over her mouth to stop her shouting. He said she then suffered a fit and collapsed. Initially, Tsourakakis had told an ambulance crew that Dimopoulou died suddenly after feeling indisposed.

A 2-year-old Gypsy boy drowned yesterday after falling into a canal outside the village of Iraklia, near the town of Serres in northern Greece. Iraklia Mayor Christos Samaras said the canal’s fences had been swept away during floods in late July.

Firemen on the Ionian island of Corfu were battling until late yesterday to contain a forest fire that broke out early in the afternoon in the area of Strongyli. Over 70 firemen and 13 fire engines took part in the effort, assisted by two firefighting helicopters and two light aircraft.

Two people were arrested on the island of Syros, in the central Cyclades, on Tuesday for beating up a harbor police officer following a heated exchange as they were trying to board a ferry at the harbor of Ermoupolis. A Merchant Marine Ministry announcement on Wednesday said Eleftherios Rambos, 42, and Panayiota Papageorgopoulou, 23, swore at policeman Apostolos Soultanis and then started punching him after he tried to stop them from jumping the queue. Soultanis needed to be hospitalized for his injuries.

A Thessaloniki University team has discovered part of a fossilized rhinoceros skull near the village of Milia, in the area of Grevena, northern Greece, reports said on Wednesday. The fossil is believed to be 3 million years old. The Grevena area has yielded a wealth of fossils during excavations since the mid-1990s, including two mammoth tusks over four meters long.

The Aegean Regatta 2002, a sailing race organized by the Ministry of the Aegean, kicks off tomorrow from the port of Lakki on Leros, in the Dodecanese. After stops on Kos and Symi, the race will end on Rhodes next Saturday. About 90 vessels are participating.