The Fontainebleau public prosecutor’s office indicated on Wednesday July 15 that it was requesting the provisional detention of two people, including a volunteer firefighter, suspected of being at the origin of the outbreak of fires on Monday which ravaged around 2,000 hectares.
The defendants, aged 18 “both and unrelated, student for one, volunteer firefighter for the second”, have “recognized their voluntary involvement during their custody” and “will be presented during the day to an investigating judge at the Fontainebleau court”.
After 48 hours of fighting, the approximately 800 firefighters mobilized managed, on Tuesday July 14, to put down the two fires which spread over a little more than 2,000 hectares of the Fontainebleau forest, for which four police custody is still in progress, including that of a volunteer firefighter.
“Fixed, that means that they are blocked in their perimeter” but not “extinguished”, declared the prefect of Seine-et-Marne Pierre Ory during a press briefing, stressing that the firefighters will still have to be on the job for days, even weeks.
France: fire in the Fontainebleau forest
Nalini LEPETIT-CHELLA, Valentina BRESCHI / AFP
Three Canadairs, a Dash and two water bomber helicopters will still be available on Wednesday to the firefighters, still mobilized on the ground, continued the prefect.
“With nearly 300 drops” over the last two days, “aerial resources have played a decisive role in controlling these fires,” Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said in a message on
Two suspects, arrested on Monday and whose police custody was extended on Tuesday, admitted the facts: a volunteer firefighter in Fontainebleau who admitted to having “set fire to twigs with a lighter and gasoline”, and another man who admitted to “having accidentally set the fire by throwing his cigarette” at another place where the fire started, said the Fontainebleau prosecutor, Diane Ngomsik.
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The two men, born in 2007 and without a criminal record, are suspected of starting separate fires on Monday, in Arbonne-la-Forêt for the first, and in the Faisanderie sector near the town of Fontainebleau for the second, the magistrate said in a press release. The volunteer firefighter was “suspended”, indicated in a press release the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (Sdis) of Seine-et-Marne, which expressed “its deepest dismay”.
Two people were placed in police custody on Tuesday morning for the fire which started on Sunday around the A6, causing the closure of a section of the motorway and which ravaged around 1,600 hectares in 48 hours. The custody of two other people, for whom the prosecutor said she did not have “enough evidence at this stage”, was lifted on Tuesday afternoon.
“I will not tell you more (…) because the investigations must continue in complete serenity and at present, I have no information to communicate to you,” insisted Diane Ngomsik. Could the A6 reopen on Wednesday, according to the prefect.
On Tuesday, bulldozers were also used to widen a track that penetrates the burning surface. With the fires now set, the hundreds of people who had been evacuated will be able to return to their homes, but not before Wednesday, explained Pierre Ory.
The emblematic Fontainebleau forest massif, with its exceptional biodiversity, covers approximately 25,000 hectares, 60 km southeast of Paris. It welcomes more than 15 million visitors each year. The fire in the Fontainebleau forest, in the northern half of the country until then relatively spared, demonstrates that no region is safe from these summer fires. Vegetation fires were set for Monday at Cap Fréhel in Brittany, or in Lozère.
