PARIS, July 14 (Reuters) – One of the people arrested on suspicion of having started the fire in a historic forest near Paris was a volunteer firefighter who confessed \u200con Tuesday, French media said, citing the local prosecutor, as fire brigades continued to \u200cbattle the blaze near one of France’s best-known royal palaces.<\/p>\n
In addition to this volunteer firefighter in Fontainebleau, who admitted to “setting fire \u200bto twigs with a lighter and gasoline,” a second suspect admitted to “accidentally starting a fire by throwing away his cigarette”, prosecutor Diane Ngomsik told French media.<\/p>\n
The two men, born in 2007, had no prior criminal record, the prosecutor was quoted as saying.<\/p>\n
A local official, Prefect Pierre Ory, said two blazes around the \u200cFontainebleau forest were still raging but \u2060had been “contained”, with the main blaze having scorched 1,600 hectares and another one nearby 450 hectares.<\/p>\n
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said on Monday the fire was just \u2060a few kilometres away from the Palace of Fontainebleau, which explained the deployment of considerable resources, including water-carrying planes and helicopters.<\/p>\n
The forest around the palace, which 16th-century King Francis I turned into a symbol of \u200bFrench power, \u200bserved as a royal hunting ground for centuries. It \u200blater became a celebrated subject for \u200cImpressionist painters.<\/p>\n
On Monday, for the first time, Canadair aircraft skimmed the River Seine to fill their tanks, attempting to contain a blaze that turned the sky black.<\/p>\n
Just 70 km (40 miles) from Paris, the fire forced the closure of the A6 highway linking the capital with Lyon and the south. Smaller fires in the area also disrupted high-speed train services.<\/p>\n
As many as 900 people were evacuated from their \u200chomes.<\/p>\n
Nunez said the Fontainebleau blaze is contributing to what \u200bwill likely be a historic year for fires in France, \u200bwith 32,000 hectares burned already this year, \u200bmore than the total in 2025.<\/p>\n
“We’ll probably have a record year,” he said. “We \u200cexpected this with this major drought.”<\/p>\n
Europe is \u200benduring its third heatwave of \u200bthe summer, with tinder-dry vegetation and high temperatures fuelling blazes from the Iberian Peninsula to France. Many scientists say climate change is making wildfires more frequent and difficult to combat.<\/p>\n
Nunez \u200bsaid 59 people have been \u200carrested across France on suspicion of starting fires across the country. Around half were adults \u200band half minors, with some repeat offenders, he said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Michel Rose and Gabriel \u200bStargardter; Editing by Kevin Buckland and David Gregorio)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS, July 14 (Reuters) – One of the people arrested on suspicion of having started the fire in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51538,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[33618,33019,32987,5,8938,46,30,33619,33617],"class_list":["post-51537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-paris","tag-fire-brigades","tag-fontainebleau","tag-fontainebleau-forest","tag-france","tag-french-media","tag-laurent-nunez","tag-paris","tag-royal-palaces","tag-volunteer-firefighter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}