According to the Ministry of the Interior, 10 % of the 300,000 fires identified each year are deliberate acts, but this figure is probably underestimated.
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The virulent recovery of the megafeu in Gironde, after a first intense episode in July, relaunches the hypothesis of a malicious act. The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, suggested it Thursday, August 11, declaring that there were “great suspicions” that these fire covers were “the fact of incendiaries”. As proof, the “a few hundred meters apart” between the starts of fire. A phenomenon considered by specialists as a convincing index of voluntary fire.
These remarks do not, however, rely on the investigations carried out, since the agents of the departmental cell research of the causes and circumstances of the forest fires have not yet been able to start working for security reasons.
These working groups, made up of gendarmes, police and forest guards, analyze burnt sites as scientific police do on a crime scene. They seek to delimit a perimeter, as reduced as possible, on which a fire departure took place and study all the available clues: cigarette butts, fuel traces, imprints on a possible lighter and testimonies. Cell reports are transmitted to prosecutors. Two cases of pyromania, in Ardèche and in Hérault, were particularly publicized in July, but they are far from being the only ones.
Exceptional drought and heat wave alone do not explain the multiplication of households in Gironde, in Doubs, Hérault or Finistère. Each week, convictions are pronounced for voluntary fires or not. Thus, on July 26, three young men in his twenties were sentenced in immediate appearance to seventy hours of general interest and five months suspended prison by the Rennes court for having put the Fire in a field in Saint-Aubin-d’Aubigné (Ille-et-Vilaine), quickly circumscribed by the firefighters.