Three people have died in Greece as stormy weather and freezing temperatures gripped most of the country, officials said Sunday.

The bodies of two elderly men were found Sunday, two days after their car was swept away by flood waters near Athens, the fire department said.

A day earlier, rescue crews had found a 66-year-old woman dead inside the same car in the rural area of Keratea.

Greece is battling a prolonged cold snap that has seen temperatures fall to below -18 Celsius (-0.4 Fahrenheit) in some areas and covered parts of the country in snow.

The rescue services have received dozens of calls-outs to help people trapped in their cars or homes by heavy snowfall.

On Saturday, firefighters rescued a pair of French hikers stranded in a forest on the island of Lesbos.

The poor weather has also disrupted travel, forcing highway closures and coastal ferry and intercity train cancellations.

On Friday, a Ryanair flight bound for Thessaloniki was rerouted to Timisoara, Romania, because of poor visibility.

Germany raises avalanche alert after female skier dies
Frankfurt Am Main (AFP) Jan 6, 2019 - Heavy snowfall in southern Germany and the death of a skier prompted authorities Sunday to raise the avalanche alert warning in the Bavarian Alps to the second-highest level.

The Bavarian avalanche warning service said it had boosted the alert level to four on a scale of five, warning of a "great danger of avalanches in the Bavarian Alps".

A 20-year-old woman died Saturday after she was buried by an avalanche on the Teisenberg mountain range in Upper Bavaria, near the Austrian border. Five other people in her ski group were unharmed.

Meteorologists said they expected the region, already hit by days of heavy snow, to see a further 10 to 40 centimetres (four to 16 inches) of the white stuff by Monday.

A thick blanket of snow snarled rail and road traffic across the state of Bavaria over the weekend, while Munich airport was forced to cancel 130 flights on Saturday.

The situation at the airport eased on Sunday, with 15 flights scrapped by mid-afternoon and others facing minor delays, a spokeswoman told AFP.

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