By throwing his megot, this mason triggered, in 2016, the fire of more than 2,500 hectares and a hundred housing, for 63 million euros of damage.
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A idiotic gesture and the error of a life. Judged since Monday by the court of Aix-en-Provence to have unintentionally triggered a gigantic fire – the fifth largest forest of the Bouches-du-Rhône since 1973 – Mostafa El Fathi was sentenced, Tuesday, November 16, to Five years in prison, four years suspended (the year of imprisonment closes being to purge under the regime of the electronic bracelet).
On August 10, 2016, when he throws a megot he believes he believes off at the foot of a Brush slope, this mason of Berre-L’Etang (Bouches-du-Rhône) is immediately exceeded. “At the speed where the fire took, even taking the watering hose, there was nothing to do, I saved myself,” he confided on Monday before the court, where he had to to face the immensity of the damage it has caused.
The President of the Tribunal, Estelle Lassaussois, gave the excess: 2,655 hectares traveled by the flames including 630 ha of forest, 117 facilities and buildings affected by the fire, 26 houses entirely destroyed and 93 other seriously damaged. Attached by a violent wind and a drought of exceptional vegetation, the flames had been arrested only to the doors of Marseille after a race of fifteen kilometers at the speed of 83 meters per minute. Of the 447 victims, more than 250s have consistently. It took six hours in court to call the victims and “take stock” on each of them.
“We do not smoke in the pine forest”
“If I could go back …”: Mostafa El Fathi did not have a lot of words to express his regret while the president put him in the face of his initial lies. The day after the fire, the mason is heard as a simple witness on his presence on the site of the path of Tamaris to Rognac, where the fire left. He built the house of a volunteer firefighter. The gendarmes who ask him then: “Did you smoke on the site yesterday?” He answers no. A few months later, in November 2016, this time custody, he concedes he was smoked but keeps any memory. It is only during the instruction that he will recognize the jet of a megot. But, he explained, in court, “I died the cigarette, I had to trouble it. Asked about these evolving versions, “his problem to tell the truth”, the mason evoked “the pressure”: “I’m sorry, I have always worked, I’m not used to justice. But when J A recognized, I was relieved. “
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