A man suspected of trying to start a fire was arrested Tuesday evening near the emblematic French forest of Fontainebleau, where some 800 firefighters were still trying to contain the outbreak of fire Wednesday morning.
• Also read: Fires in the Fontainebleau forest: operations to prevent fire outbreaks
• Also read: Fontainebleau forest fires: six people arrested, including a volunteer firefighter who admitted the facts
The 46-year-old man was arrested in a parking lot closed to the public with numerous crumpled newspapers and a lighter in his vehicle, we learned from a police source.
The Fontainebleau prosecutor indicated Tuesday evening that four people remained in police custody in the investigation into the fires which covered nearly 2,000 hectares of this forest massif located south of the capital.
Among these, two men born in 2007 and with no criminal record, arrested on Monday, 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, according to the prosecutor, Diane Ngomsik.
The volunteer firefighter had been serving in his position “for less than a year”, according to a spokesperson for the Departmental Fire and Rescue Service (Sdis) of Seine-et-Marne. He was suspended.
Two other people were placed in police custody on Tuesday morning for the fire which started on Sunday around the A6 motorway, which crosses part of the forest, and which ravaged around 1,500 hectares.
The prosecutor raised on Tuesday “the hypothesis of a fire outbreak likely to be linked to work carried out in the immediate vicinity of the motorway”, recalling that her services are exploring “all hypotheses, both accidental and voluntary”.
Tuesday evening the prefect of Seine-et-Marne announced that the fires were “fixed” even if not completely “extinguished”. Some 800 firefighters remained on the job to prevent them from resuming, and will remain mobilized for a while to avoid zombie fires.
“A peat fire can spread (in the ground) for several days, even several weeks and sometimes resurface more than a hundred meters from the initial fire,” warned prefect Pierre Ory on Tuesday.
In the south of the country, fires in Haute-Corse have covered some 150 hectares in the last three days, requiring the closure of a portion of the GR30 and the evacuation of around twenty hikers.
