A Georgian woman accused of accidentally igniting one of several wildfires that have raged relentlessly across the eastern Aegean isle of Chios will appear in court to face charges of unintentional arson.
Greek fire brigade officials said the woman, employed as a housekeeper on Chios, the ancestral home of some of Greece’s wealthiest shipping families, had “confessed” to triggering the blaze when she negligently discarded a cigarette.
Speaking from the island, Lt Constantine Kozanis told the Guardian the unidentified woman would be tried on Thursday. “She is being held in detention overnight and will appear in court tomorrow,” he said.
“Because she was caught red-handed the process will move fast now that she has appeared before a public prosecutor. In her testimony to fire brigade investigators she admitted she had thrown a cigarette that had ignited one of [the five] fronts.”
Witnesses also reported seeing the incident.
More than 400 firefighters, backed by water-dumping aircraft and hundreds of volunteers, have been battling blazes on Chios since Sunday, forcing authorities to call a state of emergency and dozens of villages to be evacuated.
Blazes broke out in different areas of the island simultaneously. As the fires spread, fuelled by gale force winds, officials raised the spectre of some of the conflagrations being started deliberately, saying it was otherwise hard to explain how they had erupted in such diverse areas at the same time.
Giorgos Toumbos, president of the Chios Mastic Producers Union, told the Greek daily Kathimerini late on Tuesday that efforts were focused on putting out flames raging across a prime plateau to prevent the fires engulfing mastic villages – 14th-century fortified villages famous for their production of mastic resin – farther south.
A reported 40,000 hectares have been reduced to ashes on the island. It is unclear how many tourists were visiting Chios when the conflagrations erupted on 22 June.
Kozanis said the fires were receding but were by no means “entirely under control”.
“They have yet to be fully contained,” he added. “Yes, they are in recession but they have not been extinguished.”
A Mediterranean hotspot, Greece is on the frontline of the climate emergency with the countryexperiencing a dramatic uptick in wildfiresbecause of higher temperatures and ever-drier conditions in recent years.
Faced with a dramatic increase in forest fires, Greece’s centre-right government has toughened penalties for arson and ecological destruction with the criminal code foreseeing prison terms of up to 20 years and fines of up to €200,000 for such crimes.
Greece is experiencing its first heatwave of the summer with temperatures expected to nudge 40C in the coming days.