A 46-year-old man appeared before the Ardèche criminal court to answer for thirteen fires lit on the side of the road on July 27, 2022 which destroyed 1,200 ha. Fires started between Saint-Etienne-de-Boulogne and Lussas via Saint-Julien-du-Serre, recalls France Bleu Drôme Ardèche . No less than 600 firefighters were mobilized and 350 people were evacuated.
Upon his arrest, the accused, father of three children, admitted the facts. In the criminal court, he assured that he would no longer “remember everything”On the day of the incident, the forty-year-old was heavily intoxicated, he said. The Dauphiné Libéré . His two lawyers insisted on the progress made by their client at this level but also on his desire for reintegration.
Four years in prison
One of the lawyers insisted: “He made all the necessary efforts to provide answers and these answers must be heard. We don’t have 100% of the answers to everything. The reality is that in the context of a cocktail which was deadly for the latter, the depression, the alcohol and this psychological collapse created this passage to the act.. He added that the experts had spoken and that the defendant was not an arsonist. His action, according to a psychological expert, was a “a generalized movement of hatred stemming from a long-standing, unspoken depressive process”.
The forty-year-old, who has already served two years in prison, was sentenced on Friday, June 28, 2024, to four years in prison, without a warrant of committal. The attorney general expressed her regret at not having obtained more explanations for this gesture.
