ATLANTA \u2014 As wildfires blazed in southern Italy this week, authorities probing for arson found a grisly clue: cats “with flammable-soaked rags tied to their tails.”<\/p>\n
“These animals were released into the fields, running around and spreading the fire,” said Domenico Costarella of Calabria’s Civil Protection Agency in a video posted on Facebook on Tuesday. He added that other pieces of evidence also pointed to arson, including candles lit among flammable rags and delayed ignition devices.<\/p>\n
Firefighters are still working to contain blazes<\/a> around Calabria’s Pollino National Park, according to Italian broadcaster RAI, which reported Wednesday that firefighting teams have completed more than 160 missions within Calabria in the past 24 hours.<\/p>\n According to CNN’s Italian affiliate SkyTG24, the Italian Association for the Defense of Animals and the Environment has filed a criminal complaint and offered a 1,000 euro reward for information on who may have set the cats alight.<\/p>\n Europe has been consumed by a nasty fire season this year, according to the European Forest Fire Information System, or EFFIS. A wet winter provided new vegetation, much of which became tinder for fires after three successive summer heatwaves<\/a>. While 2026 has been a better year for fires<\/a> in Europe overall, the continent’s fire season is still above the 20-year average, EFFIS said in a daily bulletin.<\/p>\n Using cats to spread fire is not a new phenomenon in southern Italy. In 2016, authorities in Sicily blamed the mob<\/a> for using cats to start forest fires in a national park. The next year, officials said the same tactic was used to set fires outside of Naples, near Mount Vesuvius<\/a>.<\/p>\n UC Berkeley researcher Lauren Pearson told CNN last year that there is evidence that Mafia groups often set fires to gain control of territory, often buying land at a premium in the aftermath.<\/p>\n In recent years, Pearson said, some organized crime groups have taken advantage of Italy’s clean energy transition; one farmer who testified to an anti-Mafia commission in 2022 said he was approached by solar panel companies to sell his land after it had been burned.<\/p>\n Sergio Nazzaro, a journalist and former spokesman for the president of the Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission, said that Mafia groups exploit emergencies through front organizations, “from the labor force that sets the fire to the concession to build on burned land.”<\/p>\n In Calabria, Costarella of the Civil Protection Department warned that stopping arson would take a societal shift.<\/p>\n “We are getting back to work and returning to our posts, but we need a shift in mindset,” he said. “These are inhumane acts. Sadly, men are their own worst enemies.”<\/p>\n \n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ATLANTA \u2014 As wildfires blazed in southern Italy this week, authorities probing for arson found a grisly clue:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[539,1283,4954,436,1294,2016,5,2224,1879,3750,36,2067,4955,129,2399,1980,4956,1981],"class_list":["post-34580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-animals","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-crime","tag-environment","tag-homes","tag-italy","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-nature","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}