The Department of Justice has launched an investigation to determine whether some of the fires were the result of criminal activity
Fires that ravaged urban and forested areas in northeastern Algeria on Wednesday and Thursday, killing at least 38 people, have been brought under control, a Civil Protection official said today.
“All the fires are fully under control,” said Fire Chief Farooq Ashour, who is also the Civil Protection’s deputy director of Intelligence and Statistics.
The official, provisional death toll is 37 – including 30 people, including 11 children and six women, in El Tarf, near the Tunisian border. Five more people died in Souk Ahras and two in Setif. But several local media outlets are reporting that there is still one dead, a 72-year-old man in Gelma.
For 48 hours, more than 1,700 firefighters battled more than 20 wildfires, which injured about 200 people, some seriously.
The Department of Justice has launched an investigation to determine whether some of the fires were the result of criminal activity.
The prosecutor’s office in Souk Ahra, where an entire family perished in the blaze, announced the arrest of an arsonist in a forest near the city of 500,000. More than 350 families were forced from their homes and a maternity clinic located near a wooded area was evacuated.
Three men were also arrested by the police near El Tarf. They are accused of setting fire to a neighbor’s crops, although authorities are not currently linking the incident to the fires that broke out in the area.
At the same time, experts criticized the lack of firefighting equipment, such as firefighting aircraft, but also the absence of forest care.
This year, since the beginning of August, almost 150 fires have broken out in Algeria, which have destroyed thousands of hectares.
Forest fires occur every year in the northern part of the country, but the phenomenon is getting worse every year due to climate change causing drought and heat waves.
Last summer was the deadliest in nearly 60 years: at least 90 people died in fires in northern Algeria, while more than 1,000,000 hectares burned.
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