A former volunteer firefighter was sentenced on Wednesday by the Béziers criminal court to two years in prison, including one year suspended on probation, for having caused two fires in early August in Hérault.
The 33-year-old was also banned from traveling to the department for five years.
The prosecutor, Camille Julla-Marcy, had requested a three-year prison sentence, including eighteen months suspended.
On August 2, around 7 p.m., the Hérault firefighters intervened on a vegetation fire in the natural and agricultural area of Pézenas.
The fire, extinguished in two hours, had spread over 500 m2 without causing any damage to homes.
The gendarmes were then alerted to the presence of an individual with suspicious behavior who had also been seen in the afternoon near a first start of fire, quickly circumscribed by the firefighters.
Arrested on the day of the events when he was drunk, he ended up recognizing, after his sobering up, to be the author of the fire of the evening.
On the other hand, he disputed any responsibility in the first outbreak of fire.
"He doesn't explain anything"
The man, a volunteer firefighter in Ardèche between 2008 and 2011, maintained his version this Wednesday in court, denying being the author of the first fire and repeating "not understanding" why he had lit the second.
"He doesn't explain anything, but that doesn't make him an arsonist fascinated by fire," argued his lawyer, Michel-Pierre Raynaud-Bardon, pleading for clemency.
“He is part of a worrying process for a former firefighter, in a national context that must also be taken into account,” accused the prosecutor during her indictment.
According to a provisional report from the gendarmerie dated September 23, 48 people were arrested in France this summer marked by a record of burned areas, especially in the Southwest.
Before Wednesday's judgment, 12 of them had already been sentenced: the heaviest sentence, two years in prison, was pronounced against a young man convicted of a series of fires in Gironde.
