In late August, as wildfires still raged in Greece, a video went viral. A man had filmed himself walking to the back of a trailer attached to a Jeep. He threw open the trailer door to reveal a group of men huddled inside, all of them migrants from Pakistan and Syria. He was holding the 13 men captive, he said, because he had caught them planning to set fires on the outskirts of the northeastern city of Alexandroupoli, the capital of Greece’s Evros region, that shares a border with Turkey.

“Let’s all go out and round them up,” the man says in the video, urging Greeks to follow his lead and perform citizen’s arrests on migrants. “They will burn us.” 

The Greek police arrested the man who made the video, and he is currently awaiting trial. The police also arrested the migrants the man claimed he had caught attempting to start fires. They were later released without charges.

The video, and others like it, tapped into suspicions among residents of Evros that the wildfires were the fault of migrants, thousands of whom pass through the region’s thick forest every year en route to inland Europe. Simmering anger against migrants has bubbled to the surface in Greece, aided by social media, as locals seek to apportion blame for intense wildfires that have been torching their region since July.